Excellence is a self-defeating goal, but so is failure

If you aspire to be excellent, you will suffer at every failure and perhaps struggle to withstand enough failures to become excellent. Aspiring to excellence means you will likely not eventually achieve excellence.

If you aspire to failure - that is, you create with the expectation of failure - you will enter the state of play or flow and tap the power of your subconscious, where excellent things will eventually come from. If excellence is defined as success, then aspiring to failure means you will eventually not fail.

The self-contradiction and anti-symmetry of these statements is very satisfying.