How to Learn From Failure

Reading Time: 8 Minutes

What to Expect:

• The science of overcoming resistance to failure

• How to frame failure correctly

In a past edition of the newsletter, you learned about why it's hard to learn from failure.

People want to protect their egos, have difficulty attending to the situation, and are motivated to explain them away rather than elaborate and unpack them. As a result, failure tends to bring about a combination of mental states that don't facilitate good learning but instead facilitate a desire to avoid and move on as quickly as possible.

Another reason people fail to learn from failure, though, is that we haven't actually been taught how to do it well.

When I've worked with elite performers who have failed, their tendency isn't so much to learn from failure as it is to analyze all the things that went wrong. Though subtly different, this mental effort feels like learning much the same way anxiety feels like problem-solving. It's an act of doing something, but that something is probably not actively leading to learning from the mistakes.

This "doing something" creates the illusion of learning. It's mistaking activity for accomplishment.

To most effectively learn from failure, we need to give people the skills to do it repeatedly and in a way that doesn't threaten their ego or fall into the traps that prevent the learning in the first place.

Here's a first look at how we can stay motivated to learn after failure. In the final edition of this installment, we'll look at evidence-backed tactics for extracting meaning from failure to make the most of falling short.

Ask yourself about progress

The first challenge when you fail is staying motivated to extract something meaningful from experience. The best way to do that is by focusing the failure on a sign of a lack of progress, not a lack of competence or commitment.

After a failure, we naturally turn internally to reflect on the activity. For most people, that reflection also leads to the basic question of whether or not we want to continue. That line of questioning leads to a reduced commitment, because we're often not motivated to subject ourselves to something uncomfortable like the prospect of failing again.

When we focus our internal energy on the lack of progress we've made by asking ourselves questions like "have I made enough progress?", we frame the failure more adaptively and in a way that motivates us to pick up the pace. If you're progressing slowly, answering this question will speed you up.

Asking about progress also shifts the conversation in your mind away from whether or not you can do it to whether or not you want to do it. Confidence that you can improve is often a better predictor of whether or not you will improve than your actual ability (Fishbach, 2023).

Use a growth mindset

A growth mindset is about recognizing the importance of effort and hard work in the outcomes that you (fail to) achieve. In the case of learning from failure, recognizing that there's an opportunity to work toward mastery with some persistence and hard work will allow you to move toward a more adaptive response to failure.

Another way to think about a growth mindset in this context is a "learning mindset." This framing helps tap into an identity you're motivated to create - that of a person who learns from failure, rather than a person who failed.

These two framings allow you to focus on improving your skills, rather than getting it right. When we focus on improvement through hard work and effort, mistakes and setbacks become sources of information about how we can improve, rather than signposts that we're not good enough.

The key to adopting this approach is recognizing the process that your brain goes through when you put forth greater effort and persevere through difficulty. Your skill isn't static. It's molded and modeled after repeated attempts, and if you continue to take on challenges, it's going to adapt in ways that serve you better over the long term.

Zoom out

You've heard the saying "Time heals all wounds." The same is true for failure.

Failure needs distance for learning to take place.

That distance can be psychological, time-based, or both. 

When you experience a failure, your default response is going to be to protect your ego (which, by the way, is pretty adaptive). But to learn from a failure, we need to move past that.

To gain some psychological distance, you can start by looking at the failure as though it happened to someone else. Imagine this failure happened to your teammate, for example. What would be the lesson you could extract here?

When we imagine a failure happening to someone else, we're better able to learn and maintain our motivation to improve.

The second distancing strategy you can use is time. A classic example of this is breakups. In the heat of the moment, it's hard to figure out what you can do better in an ending relationship. It feels too personal and there's too much loss going on. But usually, months later, you can clearly see you aren't right for someone AND identify something you could improve on for your next one.

The same is true for playoff games, postseason defeats, and other big, negative outcomes. With a little bit of time and space, it becomes easier to embrace an objective approach to the performance. You're better able to spot where you feel short and not feel the pain so acutely, which helps you process it more effectively.

Give Advice

The final step to consider taking after failure is to find someone going through something similar, and to try and provide advice about how to handle it.

You might feel a tad like an imposter approaching it this way. But, we're consistently better at helping other people navigate problems than we are at solving our own, particularly when there's ego involved. The psychological distance we get from providing advice, plus the ability to be a bit more objective about someone else's situation, is a potent recipe for coming up with creative solutions to a stuck point.

Giving advice also helps you feel a bit more confident. Even though you've failed, it reminds you of the knowledge and skills you do have and what you do well. Giving advice gives you a glimpse of competence. 

But that's not the only advantage. Think of advice as an internal mirror, reflecting your thoughts and experiences back at you. As you try to guide others through similar hurdles, you'll often stumble upon your own hidden insights that were obscured by the fog of failure. What seemed like a clear-cut defeat becomes a complicated tapestry of missteps, lessons, and opportunities for learning.

Next up: tactics for processing failure 

You've now seen how you can keep your wits about you as you review a failure so that the motivation and opportunity to learn is maintained.

In the final installment of this series, we'll take a look at how you can actually learn from failure, using evidence-based tactics like a postmortem/debrief, hypothesis testing, and more. 

References

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

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