I go to a restaurant and ask for spicy, and then I have to stop the waiter and say it again properly, because spicy here does not mean what I mean. Hey, listen. Look at me. Not for white people, okay? Like Asian spicy, right?
I am stereotyping and I do it on purpose, because I need him to understand the size of the gap. Give my level of pepper to a man who has never eaten anything spicy in his life and you will not teach him about pepper. He might end up in hospital. His body has no tolerance built, not because he is weak, but because nothing ever asked him to build one.
That is what twenty years of do-not-fail did to your failure tolerance. The problem is not that you are fragile. It is that you have never had a big failure. They have never failed. They did not have big failures in life, so the skill set was never developed, and failing itself is a skill set.
Think about a bicycle. Somebody falls off ten times learning to ride. You could stay home instead and never fall at all. You will not fail from the bicycle if you do not ride the bicycle. But only the person who fell off it ten times ever becomes any good on it.
Two people get rejected from the same job. One is fine by Thursday, the other stops applying. What separates them?
Reps. Not talent, not confidence, not how badly either of them wanted it. The one who is fine by Thursday has been rejected before and lived through the afternoon, so this rejection arrives as information about a company. The one who stops has nothing to compare it to, so it arrives as a verdict about a person. Same envelope, two different readings, and the only thing that produced the difference was prior exposure.