Human Black Holes

Very often in life you will meet people who suck up all the positive energy from you as a black hole and transform yourself into just another of their kind. If you ask them what the symbol ‘+’ is, they may say two negatives crossed together, instead of ‘positive’. When you are embarking on challenging career like science (or any enterprising career) the last thing you want to hear is how miniscule is the possibility of your success is. Some folks I met are Hover dam of failure stories. They can write books titled '101 Failure Stories to Pull You Down' or ' Tomorrow Could be a  Day of Misery, Death and Black Plague to All' in one sitting.

In my experience more than 80% of the experiment I do fail. That may sound pretty awful. But the word of wisdom is that, if you see the contrary (i.e. >80% success story with your experiment) you should be skeptical. Either you are playing it too safe (you may be in the verge of making the ‘novel’ finding that the earth is a sphere!) or you are fooled by observational bias (you see what you want to see). As evident, both approaches will not help you to make novel findings.  Anyway, the point is, you already know from your own experience (with experiments) that your chance of success is fairly slim and getting a reinforcement of that gloomy fact from someone will not serve any meaningful purpose.

I am training myself to be completely nonchalant about the possibility of failures. Having a realistic optimism is always good for the mental wellbeing. First step for the success of that strategy is to close ears to such human black holes or at the very least do not seek any career advice from them. I strongly believe in the principle of 'doing your duty without expecting anything in return' as advised in Gita. But I should admit that I am not always successful in practicing that mind set. Paradoxically, I have seen many successful people with extreme negativity towards everything. My theory is that this negativity is guarding them somehow from failures by keeping them on the toes always (and of course making everyone around them totally miserable piece of junk). But alas only if they could cherish their own moments of success and glory!