Issue 32 · October 11, 2026

Your Hair Grows Back. Your Eyes Don't.

What I want my kids to know about the worst mistakes they'll ever make

Delilah never hid what she was doing. Three times Samson gave her a fake secret to his strength, and three times she immediately summoned the Philistines to test it. Any child could have connected the dots. Samson, the strongest man in Israel, told her the real secret anyway. They shaved his head, gouged out his eyes, and chained him to a grinding mill in Gaza.

Then comes one of the most overlooked lines in the Bible: "the hair of his head began to grow again." Not his eyes. His hair.

That sentence contains nearly everything I want my children to understand about failure. Our culture tells them two stories about mistakes, and both are lies. The first, beloved by Silicon Valley and commencement speakers, says failure is tuition: fail fast, fail forward, every setback a setup for a comeback. The second, enforced by shame and the internet, says some mistakes end you. One mistake defines you permanently, and the rest of your life is just serving the sentence.

The truth is harder than the first story and more hopeful than the second. A meaningful, purposeful life after a catastrophic, self-inflicted mistake is possible, and closer than you think. But only if you accept that the damage is permanent and keep doing your best anyway. Drop either half and the whole thing collapses.

I'm talking about a specific kind of mistake: the Samson-style mistake. It isn't bad luck or an honest misjudgment. It's the unforced error you commit despite warnings, against evidence you understood perfectly well. You didn't fail to know better. You knew better and did it anyway. Often the fallout lands hardest on the people you love most. The fault is yours, the damage is real, and you have no defense. I've made several, mostly in love and money. I expect my kids will make their own.

Brilliance is not a vaccine

Start with the company you'll keep. Julius Caesar walked into the Senate on the Ides of March after a soothsayer's warning and his wife's nightmares. According to Plutarch, he died with an unread note detailing the plot in his hand. Napoleon, perhaps the greatest military mind of his age, marched a vast army into Russia in 1812, and only a fraction of it came home. Steve Jobs, diagnosed with a rare and comparatively treatable pancreatic tumor, put off surgery for nine months in favor of juices and diets.

The lesson isn't "everyone does it, so relax." Intelligence and success don't protect you from Samson-style mistakes. They often cause them. Confidence earned in one arena becomes blindness in the next. If you're talented and ambitious, you're not less likely to make one of these. You're more likely to make a big one.

Guilt is not the end of meaning

Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz, wrote that everything can be taken from a person but one thing: "the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances." The obvious objection is that Frankl was a victim, not a culprit. What does his suffering have to do with mine, which I caused?

Frankl saw that objection coming. Decades later, he described a "tragic triad" every life must confront: pain, death, and guilt. His answer was "tragic optimism," saying yes to life in spite of all three. That includes "deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better." He did not say guilt can be erased. He said guilt can be used. It doesn't disqualify you from meaning. It's raw material for it.

Why it's closer than you think

The despair after a Samson-style mistake comes from a hidden assumption: that a meaningful life requires undoing the damage first. It doesn't, and it can't, because the damage is permanent. Once you accept that, something strange happens. The distance between you and a meaningful life shrinks from "impossible restoration" to "the next right action."

That action is always available. You can have the honest conversation. You can make the payment. You can show up on Tuesday for the person you failed on Monday. You can do this whether or not it changes anything you can measure.

To be sure

Some will object, and they should, that this is a perpetrator's self-help program. "Your search for meaning is a luxury paid for with my losses." Others will warn of moral hazard: if meaning is always available, why fear the mistake at all?

Both objections dissolve under the first half of the thesis. Accepting permanence means you never get to declare the account settled. You don't decide when you're forgiven, and you don't get your eyes back. Doing your best isn't a way to feel better. It's aimed outward, at the people you harmed and the ones you still can help. It's often messy: making things right in one place can cost you in another. That is not cheap grace. It's the most expensive kind.

The kicker

Here is what I want my kids to know. You will make a Samson-style mistake someday. You'll have been warned, you'll have known better, and the people you love will pay for it. Some things you lose will never come back.

But your hair will start to grow again. It won't be because the past is forgiven or the damage repaired. It will be because you get up in the dark, chained to whatever mill your choices built, and do your best anyway. That isn't the consolation prize for a meaningful life. It is a meaningful life, and it's always one step away.