P2P No. 13 — On Failure
Dare to be wise (Latin proverb).
Popular culture often overembraces failure and fails to emphasize the signal in the noise. Kelly McGonigal communicates this point concisely in The Upside of Stress:
Stressful situations — including failures — are not good per se, but they can be useful since we can learn from them.
Challenging ourselves can ensure that we feel alive and brings meaning into our lives — this is why I advocate for higher-risk projects in The barbell strategy of research.
We will get bored too soon if we can fully anticipate how the solution will materialize. On the other hand, having no clue about what to do is not constructive. In the context of learning, this is translated to the 85% rule, i.e., the difficulty of a task should be adjusted to provide an approximately 85% success rate.
Thus, the original paper published in Nature explicitly encourages failure.
But this is not the romanticized founder who embraces (maybe even seeks) failure, but a more realistic personality who gives his best to succeed in a non-trivial endeavor and is prepared to grow from failure.
Failure is inevitable, the crucial question is whether we make use of it.
However, it is often frightening to take on the challenge. Leaving the comfort zone does not make sense in the short term: why would you risk failure when you can reap the fruits of success by sticking to the old ways of doing things. In the long term, stretching ourselves shows what we are capable of. In the words of Seneca (On Providence, 4.3):
“I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent—no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.”
It is about the challenge, not the failure, though extending our comfort zone comes with an increased chance of failure. Before starting research, I made a few decisions in my studies to stay safe. Which, I reckon, made it harder to accept when life throws misfortune at you.
If your world revolves around always being right like mine did for too long, it is hard to swallow, I know. But real strength emerges when we can shift our mindsets from the cowardice of being afraid to facing the challenge and learning from it.
Failure is neither a stigma nor a badge of honor. It is feedback and an opportunity to learn.
To leverage the learning signal, it can feel like opening Pandora's Box: when recently going through a rough experience, I did not enjoy thinking back to it, but I convinced myself that I needed to. It is hard to admit being arrogant, selfish, egotistic, or hurt someone's feelings. But it is even harder to live in a world where you think everyone is driving on the wrong side of the highway except you.
Resources
The Tao of Seneca: free PDFs from Tim Ferris
Cal Newport: Post-Exam Post-Mortem: How to learn from mistakes you made in exams