Pu Songling
Forty years of sitting the exam
Never passing, and never a turning point
Chronology of Pu Songling; his preface to Strange Tales
There's a kind of failure with no decisive battle in it. How you get through that kind of life.
What actually happened?
At nineteen Pu Songling sat the entry examinations and came first at county, prefecture and circuit level. He was locally famous. Then he sat the provincial examination for the rest of his life, from his twenties into his sixties, and never once passed, supporting his family as a live-in tutor. At seventy-one he was granted a minor honorary status by seniority. No single year in all of it was decisive — not one big defeat and a restart, but once every three years, each time just short, until he was old.
Failure with no turning point is the hardest kind
Lose a battle and you can review it and change direction. Forty years of being just short offers no single event worth reviewing and no signal about whether to stop. Most advice about handling failure assumes there is a turning point to point at. Here there isn't one.
Six years of sitting the same qualifying exam, a few marks short every time. That isn't one failed venture.
He didn't stop, and he didn't make it everything
Worth noticing: he neither gave up the exam nor staked the whole of his life on it. The tutoring continued, the family was kept, the stories were collected. Running them in parallel means that when the thing that never worked fails again, something else in your hands is working.
While the main thing refuses to happen, the important part is not letting it become the only thing you do.
You may keep more than one ruler
The examination was a ruler handed to him from outside, clear and unambiguous — which is exactly what makes it easy to let it become the only one. He had a second: how many stories this year. The second doesn't make the first easier. It stops there being one reading.
If a whole year yields only 'failed again', that isn't a year in which nothing happened.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: something you've worked at for years hasn't happened, and you can't say when it would.
Ask first: this year, apart from the thing that didn't happen, what did move? If you can't name one, fill that gap before deciding whether to continue.
Where it goes wrong: using him to argue that persistence pays — he never passed; or the reverse, that he should have quit. He didn't quit. He just didn't let it be the only thing.
Lines to keep
No year was decisive. Just short every time, until he was old.
A lost battle can be reviewed. Being just short cannot.
Don't let the thing that never works become the only thing you do.