How to learn from failure

Failure is part and parcel of what it means to be an elite athlete.

The best shooters in the NBA still miss 60% of their shots. The best hitters in baseball are failing even more often than that. The best teams still lose a meaningful percentage of their games (at the very highest levels), and the best executives will be wrong in their assessment of talent a few times, too.

Since we can't do away with failure, it's helpful to figure out how to try and learn from failure effectively. We want to develop an arsenal of strategies to cope with the repeated failures you'll encounter as you pursue excellence. Ultimately, the goal will be for you to see failure as information - nothing more or less.

This short series of articles will explore the dimensions of dealing with failure: why it's hard to learn, what might help us do better, and practical steps we can take to make the most of failure today.

Let's start with why failure is tough to learn from in the first place.

Learning from failure is hard

Despite how much we've all been told that failure is a learning opportunity and that facing failure that way is the right mindset to have, science suggests that learning from failure is very, very hard.

Failure is tough to learn from because:

• The solution is not immediately accessible. When we fail, we simply learn what not to do - not what to do next time do it correctly.

• We all have egos. Failure hurts our egos, and nobody really wants to spend time just hanging out with those negative emotions.

• When we expect some negative news or information, we often try to avoid it altogether.

• We tend to ascribe failures to external factors. As a result, we fail to recognize and understand our role in the failure.

• We overgeneralize. When we fail, we tend to first get stuck on questions like, "Will it always be this way?" These questions make it difficult to extract lessons.

The real problem for performers here is that, in failing to learn from failure, you miss a ton of opportunities to improve. If you only learn from your wins, you'll be lucky to make good use of 50% of the attempts you make.

Inaccessible solutions

Think about the last time that you watched somebody do something incorrectly. What did you take away? Chances are, it was a simple sentiment - "don't do that."

When we fail at something, or see someone else fail, it gives us no information on how to do it correctly. While it's helpful to systematically eliminate what not to do, that's a long, slow slog to success. And, because people tend to avoid negative news and don't enjoy failure, that path to progress is unappealing. It's hard to maintain motivation in the face of screw-up after screw-up.

The information presented when we fail is also a bit more complex than when we succeed. Failure tends to be ambiguous. Was it because we didn't give enough effort, we chose the wrong strategy, both, or neither? In the face of this complexity and ambiguity, we are both more likely to give up trying to figure it out (it's taxing to decipher) and struggle to make any sense of it in the first place. We may come to a conclusion, but there's no way to know if that conclusion is right, either.

Other cognitive processes underpin the difficulty we have learning from failure. The primary mechanism here is attention. When we're failing, we simply stop attending and check out. It's more comfortable cognitively and emotionally.

In some situations, like sunk costs, this ability to move on and redirect attention is useful. But, in situations we're likely to encounter repeatedly - like stepping up to bat or taking a shot - this tendency to move attention from failure quickly limits our ability to learn.

Attention is implicated in many of our most important cognitive processes like learning and memory. If attention isn't applied and directed, the learning (and consolidation of the learning into memory) simply won't take place. Without attention, there's no forward action.

Finally, when we don't pay attention or apply effort, we tend to default to cognitive biases or heuristics to make sense of information. In the case of learning from failure, this most often shows up in the form of confirmation bias. When we fail, we overlook important data that doesn't fit with our initial assumptions. This is why, when people fail, they often default to easy explanations that are readily available - those explanations comport neatly with their view of the world, are easy to arrive at, and create a sense of cognitive closure that allows us to move forward (though without new, valuable information).

Ego defenses

We all have egos - it's part of what makes us human. And, we're all inclined to defend these egos. It's healthier, more adaptive, and generally better for performance if we can see ourselves as good, healthy, and capable.

Failure is often a direct signal that one of those things is missing or not up to par, or at least that's how we interpret it.

When we fail at something, our first inclination is to protect our ego. Think about the last time you got into a conflict with your partner over something you did wrong. Chances are your initial response was more along the lines of an excuse for your behavior or an attempt at picking apart their argument than an open acknowledgment that you could do something better.

To protect our ego, we engage in one of two processes. The first is defensive reasoning - a process where we avoid uncomfortable truths to protect our ego (e.g., deny responsibility, justify our behavior) and, as a result, fail to learn because we fail to analyze.

The second is ego protection - the psychological strategies we use to guard our self-esteem. These strategies are designed to mitigate and minimize the crappy feelings we have when we fail and include things like downplaying how important the outcome is or self-handicapping in the future to avoid the negative feelings associated with failure. Over time, this can also lead to avoiding difficult tasks and further personal development.

It's hard, scary, and uncomfortable to engage in an honest and open self-reflection of our shortcomings. When we fail, the information about what we're not so good at is already hard to extract, so we're essentially adding double work to get anything out of it. We need to put our egos aside AND be willing to wade through crap to learn. Most of the time, that's a combination that leads to wanting to pass over versus lean in.

Though people can often acknowledge mistakes (sometimes they have no choice, as in the case of missing a shot in front of 20,000 fans), learning what to do next is often much tougher.

An unfortunate example of this recently surfaced on social media, where a national champion player at Michigan who made a mistake said that he'd "never forgive himself" - despite winning the game. His mistake didn't even have the negative outcome he feared, but it hurt his self-esteem so much that, at least at this point, he has a hard time figuring out how to learn and let it go. 

The science here would suggest taking a different approach, which we'll explore when we dive into how to learn from failure and practical strategies you can apply.

The ostrich effect

Have you ever been to the doctor, gotten your bloodwork, and then let every call from the doctor go to voicemail because you don't want to deal with the results?

That was me in 2022. In preparation for having my first kiddo, my wife urged me to go to the doctor every other day for about 10 months. I finally caved and got everything done (it was in Canada, so at least it was free).

And then, I just ignored it for a few months. I fell victim to the Ostrich effect.

The Ostrich effect is a bias wherein we tend to avoid negative or unpleasant information, like the (mythical) idea that ostriches bury their heads in the sand when faced with danger.

If your head is in the sand, you can't learn much.

Of central importance is the idea that you're purposely avoiding information. When it comes to learning from failure, that means ignoring data or feedback that could be helpful but might be threatening or upsetting.

This outright avoidance of real, useful information is common and makes it challenging to figure out how to get better. We miss the opportunity to synthesize relevant information that might help us make a better decision because we aren't sure we want to know the truth.

This effect even plays out on larger scales. There's data suggesting that investors avoid looking at their performance during market turbulence and that managers avoid information about problems with their team or projects. Confronting information that might make us feel crappy (and thus activate our ego defenses) is a cognitively and emotionally demanding task - one that we'd prefer to avoid altogether in the first place.

Attribution

We're all motivated to figure out what causes our behavior and outcomes, and for good reason. If we can figure out what's driving things, we can learn what to repeat, avoid, or do differently.

We tend to engage in 2 types of attribution.

The first is internal. In this case, we attribute our failures to things that live within us, like ability, effort, character, or genetics. 

The second is external. These involve factors outside of our control, like luck, challenge, or what the other team does.

When it comes to learning from failure, most people default to ascribing failure to external causes (despite what you hear in post-game press conferences). When we ascribe our failures to external circumstances, we're essentially absolving ourselves of responsibility, which makes it less likely that we learn from what just happened.

Over time, this pattern can also create the illusion that no change is needed to get better. All the outcomes happen outside us.

This is termed the "self-serving bias," which, again, serves to protect our self-esteem. This bias is the tendency to attribute success to internal factors, like how hard we work or how good we are, and failures to external factors, like luck or other people. Ironically enough, when we look to examine other people's performance, we take the opposite tact and tend to view their failures as something "wrong" with them. But of course, in that instance, there's no connection to our ego that we'd need to protect.

Overgeneralization

Finally, there's one more cognitive process that limits our ability to learn.

When people fail once, they believe that they'll be more likely to fail at the same thing again in the future. This may or may not be true, but either way, this belief is likely to drive behavior and learning that's ineffective. Namely, you're more apt to just give up if you don't think you can succeed than you are to try and get better.

This kind of overgeneralization can lead to a negative self-perception, which lowers both our self-esteem (how we feel about ourselves) and our self-efficacy (what we believe we can do).

It can also prevent us from accurately and honestly assessing the cause of our screw-ups. And, if we don't believe we can do better in the future, there's no reason to put in the effort to learn and improve. Failure is inevitable with this mindset.

Next up

In a coming edition, we'll unpack strategies performers can use to more effectively learn from failure. We'll also take a look at the role of expertise in understanding failure, and how focusing on progress, generally, can help us deal with mistakes more effectively.

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References

Eskreis-Winkler, L., & Fishbach, A. (2019). Not learning from failure—The greatest failure of all. Psychological science, 30(12), 1733-1744.

Eskreis-Winkler, L., & Fishbach, A. (2022). You think failure is hard? So is learning from it. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(6), 1511-1524.

Fishbach, A. (2022). Get it done: Surprising lessons from the science of motivation. Pan Macmillan.