My colleague Patrick Allan once explained how to avoid being a sore loser at competitive games. Let's revisit his lesson in a higher-stakes context. Say, an election.

Very few people will turn a crummy Yelp review into a work project, but writer Alexandra Franzen has done just that with her new book, You're Going to Survive.

Welcome back to Mid-Week Meditations, Lifehacker's weekly dip into the pool of stoic wisdom, and a guide to using its waters to reflect on and improve your life.

It turns out that, while I am a very enthusiastic pie maker, I am not very good at it. I have seen a very wide gamut of pie failures over my baking career. Overcooked and cracked crusts, soggy bottoms, burnt edges, foul soup inside a crust -- I've been there. And this isn't as isolated as you'd think. These are all common failures in one's journey to a perfect pie, and we can learn from them. So join me, and let's get to problem solving.

Let it go, they say when you screw up. Move on, forget about it, what's done is done. No, says a recent study, you need to feel bad in order to learn.

Turning out a cake, only to have it fall apart, is one of the most frustrating experiences one can have in the kitchen. But ugly cake is still cake, and there's no reason you shouldn't eat it.

"Failure" is a major buzzword in parenting today: In order to raise successful, resilient kids, we need to let them fail. If your kid forgets his homework or his sports uniform at home, don't bring it to him. If she's struggling with building a block tower or, later on, an essay, or even later on (heaven forbid), getting to her first job on time, don't step in. Only by struggling, and sometimes failing, do kids learn exactly what they must do to succeed.

There seems to be a lot of pressure on the home cook these days. It isn't enough to feed your family chicken breasts -- one should be feeding them free-range, organic, perfectly juicy chicken breasts that were cooked sous vide and served with vegetables you regrew from a curated selection of kitchen scraps. This perfectionist vibe is permeating food writing and the culture of home cooking, with everyone striving to churn out consistently perfect meals, night after night.

At elite universities, faculty members have been noticing a problem. Many students, while impressive on paper, seem to be unable to cope with simple struggles -- getting assigned to a dorm room they're not thrilled with, scoring less than an A-minus on a midterm, or not making the cut on school teams. The lack of resilience has become so apparent that Smith College now offers an entire course on how to fail. (One uncomfortable class project: Having your worst failures projected onto a large screen in the campus hub. Ouch.)

In a perfect world, nothing bad would ever happen to anybody. On the other hand, some misfortunes can help to make you a better person. All of these experiences build empathy, teach a lesson, or make you appreciate the good things in life.

People thrive when they're working against some kind of force -- even if that force isn't real. If you're looking for a way to motivate yourself, try giving yourself an imaginary scapegoat.

Last week, readers told us their biggest life hacking fails, and some of them were truly spectacular. So good, in fact, we just had to share them with you. You'll laugh, you'll cry, but you'll mostly just be glad you didn't try out any of these hacks yourself.

Who can give you better advice on how to succeed than successful people? Well, if you're smart, you'd also listen to people who failed so you know what pitfalls to avoid. And maybe back it up with some unbiased data.

Your plans are going to fail. It doesn't matter how clever you are or how much you prepared, something is going to go wrong at some point. Your losses won't be determined by how much you can prevent things from breaking, but rather by how you handle it when they do.

Putting off a project until you have all the details right seems like common sense. If you only feel that hesitation because you're afraid to make a mistake, though, you'll never actually finish.

There's a reason failure stories are popular: They're relatable. We all fall on our faces at some point, and stories of redemption are encouraging. However, it can be tricky to find a balance between discussing your failure and just self-deprecating.

Listing out your victories is a great way to build some confidence, but it can also warp your perspective on how you achieved success. Listing out your biggest failures instead will remind you how you got to where you are, and help you learn what you need to succeed.

Do you know that sinking feeling when you look at what you’ve created and think your work totally sucks? When you’re learning a new skill, you need to realise that giving yourself permission to be terrible -- for a while -- will eventually foster better learning.

Do you know that sinking feeling when you look at what you've created and think your work totally sucks? When you're learning a new skill, you need to realise that giving yourself permission to be terrible -- for a while -- will eventually foster better learning.