A new scientific paper on failure may have succeeded in offering the most depressing opening line in the history of scientific papers: “Is there anything failure does not ruin? It destroys reputations, careers, and families; economic prospects, political prospects, and social ones.”
That’s perhaps a useful corrective to all the graduation speakers, motivational gurus, and TED-talk-giving experts who glibly recount how they persisted, failure after failure, on the way to success. It’s easy to forget that many more people fail at least as many times and never achieve their goal.
There are many more frustrated authors than best-selling ones, failed entrepreneurs than self-made billionaires, and actor-baristas than bona fide movie stars. But it may not be quite as depressing as the new paper suggests. There are some sub-categories of failure that do seem to spawn success, and there are ways of responding to failure that can improve your prospects.
The important finding in the paper, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, is that people tend to overestimate how easy it is for others to overcome failures—like failing a test or overcoming addiction.
“Our goal was to better understand resilience and what gets into people’s way,” said lead author Lauren Eskreis-Winkler of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Her results indicate that we overestimate how much people learn from failure.
One experiment used a language-learning game in which people got feedback when they chose the wrong answer. Those who paid attention to feedback improved. But fewer than participants expected.
Resilient people are those who are willing to look failure in the eye, she said. But such people are rare because looking squarely at our failures makes us feel bad about ourselves.
People also tend to overestimate the role of willpower in overcoming failure. There’s a long history of attributing addiction to a failure of will, for example. Scientists have now come to see addiction as a disease.
To recover, people need more than determination—they need medical help. Eskreis-Winkler said that by debunking myths about the ease of success after failure, the researchers were able to convince study subjects to support programmes to help people avoid relapse.
But perhaps not all failures are the same. Another scholar at Kellogg, Dashun Wang, found that in some cases, certain kinds of failures do propel people to success. Falling short can help when a competition is fierce and those who are near-miss losers are indistinguishable in skills and qualifications from the close winners.
In a 2019 paper published in Nature Communications, Wang looked specifically at data on more than 700,000 scientists applying for grant money from the US National Institutes of Health. He got data from the NIH on whose proposals were close to the cutoff: by-a-whisker winners and losers.
And Wang found that in subsequent years, the scientists who nearly missed were more successful than those who squeaked out a victory. One explanation might be that near misses were more motivated to work harder and address their weaknesses, while the winners were more complacent. Perhaps, he said, there’s an ideal dosage of failure. (Moreover, everyone gets feedback on their grant proposals, whether they’re accepted or rejected.)
And of course, once you’ve failed, your chances of success are zero if you don’t try again. So an important consideration is whether it’s worth your time and effort to study harder for that bar exam or whether you’re more likely to find success in some other career path.
Eskreis-Winkler emphasized that people fail repeatedly because they don’t accept feedback—they don’t look failure in the face.
You’re more likely to get good feedback from people you already work with than people who want to hire you. These days, employers think it’s okay to ghost candidates who put hours into applications or interviews. Unsolicited manuscripts rarely get a response. Failed auditions might get only vague comments about a “lack of fit” or “going in a different direction.”
The problem is that the gatekeepers who make these decisions don’t benefit from putting in the extra effort to tell failed applicants what they didn’t like. For useful career feedback, what you need are collaborators or employers who are invested in your success.
So failure can lead to success, indeed, but only under the right circumstances. Life is more complicated than most motivational speakers make it sound, but if we come back to the question posed at the opening of the new academic paper—“Is there anything failure does not ruin?”—the answer is probably ‘yes.’ ©bloomberg