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In praise of failure

Failing is among life’s least pleasant experiences, but nothing else is as essential to success.

Marisa Taylor | October 2008 issue

But in 1990, when Beane finally quit as a player and became a scout, he became a great one. In 1997, he signed on as general manager of the Oakland Athletics, and the team promptly embarked on an amazing winning streak, despite having one of the smallest player budgets in the major leagues. How did Beane manage to mess up a playing career that seemingly couldn’t go wrong and then mastermind a magnificent managerial record?

“Experiencing the first had led Beane to the solutions he used to achieve the second,” former cricket star Ed Smith writes in his book What Sport Tells Us About Life. “Beane’s reflections on his own career had taught him to respect performance—largely because it was never demanded of him as an emerging player … Talent only matures when harnessed within a personality that is capable of self-improvement. And talent, ironically, has a nasty knack of protecting the talented from the urge to self-improve.”

The importance of this lesson has been borne out by the research of Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck. Her studies show that failure, viewed as a learning experience—in other words, as an opportunity for self-improvement—can build and strengthen new neural pathways in the brain.

Dweck has spent her career studying intelligence, and finds that the way people view their own intelligence has a profound effect on how they react to setbacks. She was interested in how people coped with failure, and through her research noticed that some people, given a problem or task they couldn’t solve, tended to blame themselves, or become discouraged or extremely defensive. Others became invigorated by the same failure, reporting they enjoyed the challenge. “Instead of thinking that their lives had come to a screeching halt, they believed that this was a signal to try harder, to try something new, that it was an opportunity to learn,” Dweck explains. “I was determined to figure out what beliefs were at the heart of these two different reactions to failure.”

Dweck thinks people in the first category have what she calls a “fixed” theory of intelligence—they believe they’re born with a finite talent for learning. They tend to focus more on tasks they can already do well, and have a fear of trying things that might involve making a mistake or appearing stupid. Those in the latter group, who become more motivated by failures, have an “expandable” theory of intelligence—they believe they can increase their ability by putting in more effort, and tend to welcome a challenge, even if they fail the first time around.

Whether a person has a fixed or an expandable mindset can have significant effects on performance, even over a short period of time. For example, in Dweck’s most recent study, published in her 2007 book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, she followed nearly 400 middle school students in New York City over a period of two years and examined how their attitudes about their intelligence affected their math grades. Those students who had fixed mindsets saw their math grades slip. In reaction to failure, they said they planned to study less for math class, or would even consider cheating. Those with expandable mindsets saw their math skills improve. In reaction to failure, they said they’d study harder and spend more time on math.

In the second part of the study, Dweck conducted an eight-week workshop designed to teach the students with fixed mindsets that they could expand their thinking, describing the brain as a muscle that grows stronger the more it’s used. After the workshop, Dweck says, the group showed a marked improvement in their math grades and study habits. “It changed their fear of failure,” she says. “It allowed them to work wholeheartedly and not protect themselves against the possibility of a meaningful failure.”

After the workshop, the students were asked if they’d changed their minds about anything. Says Dweck, “Many of the students said that when something is hard for them, instead of giving up, they keep going, because they know that by doing that, they are making their neurons grow.” In fact, that’s exactly what happens in the brain when learning occurs. Connections among synapses, which link nerve cells in the brain, become stronger the more often learning is repeated. And new synaptic connections are formed every time the brain learns something new. So failure isn’t only a great teacher, it’s a great brain-expander.

How do fixed mindsets become set, even at young ages? Dweck recalls a time when, as a student at a public school in Brooklyn, New York, her teacher seated the class according to IQ, with those students on the lower end of the scale overlooked when it came to certain privileges like clapping erasers or carrying the flag to school assemblies. While Dweck was seated in the No. 1 spot, she found that “it took the joy out of learning, because you felt that you were being evaluated all the time.”

Her research has shown that when you praise a child for intelligence or talent, he or she sees failure as something undermining it and becomes so afraid of making mistakes that motivation is stunted. But if you put the emphasis on the process or the effort the child is putting in, the child learns to be resilient in the face of setbacks and is more open to seeking challenges.

Regarding failures as learning opportunities is crucial outside the classroom, too. In business, willingness to take risks—and possibly, to fail—is essential for success. Dweck cites the examples of companies like Apple and Xerox, which have been led by executives who encouraged effort and innovation and, when setbacks did occur, regarded them as stepping stones to something better.

That philosophy was put into practise a quarter-century ago at the educational-software firm Davidson & Associates, where founder Jan Davidson, a Los Angeles-based teacher, came up with the idea to use computers to teach math to children. She invented the highly successful computer game Math Blaster in the 1980s, which she spun off into a number of other educational computer games, making millions in the process. Still, she ran her company much the way she did her former classroom, saying to her employees, “‘This is a place where you should make lots of mistakes. We don’t want you to be afraid to take a risk.’ I used to have a sign in my schoolroom that said, ‘If you don’t make 10 mistakes a day, you aren’t trying hard enough.’” She and her husband Bob have since sold their software company and gone on to found the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, which offers scholarships and educational programs for highly gifted students.

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