A lot of what we want turns less on circumstances than on the state of mind we bring to them. Innocent learned this as an author: the same life can feel like purpose or like emptiness depending on the mind that meets it.

He treats the big words this way too. Creative genius, he says, “is not a place you reach, but a state of mind you maintain.” Success works the same — not a finish line, but a state in which “you love your life and what you’ve made of it.”

That reframes failure completely. Setbacks will pile up; they do for everyone. What actually counts as losing is something else: “Failures are many, but losing love for your life is the ultimate failure.” Keep that love, and the ordinary failures stay ordinary.