Why Learning from Failure Is So Hard
Beyond the Platitudes: How to help someone really overcome a loss
Around 10,500 athletes competed in the Paris 2024 Olympics.
Doing a really rough hand-count, I estimate that 2,014 athletes won at least one medal, while an astonishing 190 went home with at least two medals. Congratulations to the athletes, their coaches, programs, families, and supporters. (I’m thrilled for each and every one of you!)
But right now, let’s think about the 8,300 of the world’s best athletes who returned home without a win.
Some may have never expected to win. Others expected to win medals but did not.
Failure doesn’t have to be an unmitigated disaster to be demolishing, either. Instead, as University of Chicago professors Ryan Carlson and Ayelet Fishback explained in a forthcoming article, “Failure arises when an individual’s performance toward a goal falls short of their standard for success.”
So some may feel like they’d failed even though they won a medal, because they hadn’t achieved everything they had set out to accomplish.
How do you come back after a failure on the world’s biggest stage? Or any stage for that matter?
We believe that people learn from failure. We like to say that it is character-building, and we learn from our mistakes.
However, in “The Exaggerated Benefits of Failure,” a study published last month, a team of researchers found that we consistently believe that people learn more from failure than they really do.
In a series of experiments, the researchers found that respondents expected 58% of would-be attorneys who fail a bar licensing exam to succeed on the next go-round. The reality is that only 35% will pass on a second try. Of those who fail the GED1, we expect 74% of them will pass a retest. The heart-wrenching reality is that 40% of them fail every retest.
We expect 62% of heart attack survivors to take better care of themselves after the attack. Nope. It’s only 43%. That may not seem like a huge difference, but that’s 30,000 people each year not taking steps that could prolong their lives.
The cold hard truth is many of us don’t learn from our mistakes or come back winners.
We don’t automatically come back better than before. Instead, many of us will repeat the same errors. Worse yet, some just give up entirely.
So let’s go back to those Olympians who went to Paris and did not win. Or anyone who may be from reeling from some loss.
How can we help them (or help ourselves) be the ones who learn from their losses? How we can be the ones who come out better on the other end?
How do we make sure that having a loss doesn’t turn into being lost?
Why Failures Are Such Good Teachers
Failures are actually rare experiences. Most things happen correctly, and when everything goes according to plan, that is “uneventful.” That’s one of the reasons why mistakes—and yes, outright failures—can be great learning opportunities. Because they are aberrational. We sit up and pay attention. We nod when runners fly over hurdles, not fully appreciating how difficult a task it is. Then one runner falls, and our hearts stop. And we spend the rest of the race wondering how anyone else is able to traverse the obstacles.
Failures are also more complicated than a win. There are more possible factors that came into play. (Did the hurdler trip? Was he tired? Was it a lack of training? Was his shoe untied? Did another runner bump into him?) So both the rarity and the complications give us that great opportunity to learn. We learn more by scrutinizing a failure than by studying a success.
And if you give up on learning from failures, you get worse over time.
Quick Shots
More novice competitors attribute a loss to a lack of ability. Experts are more likely to believe that their failure was due to a lack of progress. And that mindset hurts less and helps them learn more.
“The Ostrich effect” describes the phenomenon that people check the relevant financial information less frequently when they know their bank balance is likely overdrawn or their stock portfolio is declining in value.
In a study of 1,156 NBA game overtimes, when a player missed the last shot in the fourth quarter, and that resulted in overtime, he played better during overtime than he played in regular games throughout the season. But the player who made a shot that prevented a loss and forced the other team into overtime, he played worse than he did usually.
After failing an experimental task, study participants expected to do better if the next round wasn’t that important, but they expected to do worse when the round was more significant.
Why Is Learning from Failure So Hard?
Most of us are good at learning from watching others make a mistake. We learn more from hearing “war stories” about someone’s mistakes than we take in when they tell us about their successes. Its learning from our own errors that’s so tough. But why?
Failures are, of course, depressing, embarrassing, disappointing, and even damaging to self-esteem. And failure (as a rarity) often comes as a surprise. If we didn’t expect it, it can land more of a gut-punch, emotionally and cognitively.
But beyond that, the ability to learn from a failure depends on the answers to three questions:
1. What is the opportunity to learn?
2. What is your motivation to learn?
3. What is your ability to learn from your mistakes?
The opportunity to learn from a failure will be dependent on the amount and type of information that someone can extract from a failure. If it’s a sudden event, a new experience, or the result happened outside of your view (e.g. an applicant is rejected by a prospective employer), then it’s tougher to learn from it.
Failure-as-motivator cuts both ways. Failure may spur you to improve, when you are determined to avoid repeating mistakes. But it can also decrease the motivation to learn, if you keep reliving that initial depression and embarrassment. (In experimental studies, participants who experience failure often tune out during the remainder of the task.)
Therefore, learning from a failure may depend on which one has the strongest pull: the chance to learn from the failure or the drop in motivation as a result of it.
The ability to learn from mistakes is also critical. Can someone understand the causes of their errors and make the needed corrections?
When we attribute the failure to things outside of our control, we’re saying there’s no actual need/motivation to improve. We did everything right.
On the flip side, if we believe the causes of our errors are within our control, then we’re more likely to persist and work through the difficulty.
Even for those who hold themselves accountable, they can still fail to learn from failure, if they draw the wrong conclusions from the facts at hand.
Fascinatingly, believing you can learn from mistakes may matter as much as your actual ability to improve.
Earlier this year, researchers Sunkee Lee and Jisoo Park published their findings relating to 307 California cardiothoracic surgeons performing coronary bypass surgeries over 15-year period. For these surgeons, a “failure” was a patient who died due to the surgery. The researchers concluded that these surgeons learn from their mistakes and improve their performance in subsequent surgeries, until a certain number of deaths. At that point, they stop learning and their performance declines until they quit the profession. Now, there are a lot of contributing factors we can’t account for in that scenario. For example, the best surgeons may be taking more cases and the more difficult cases, while the worst surgeons may have more limited practices.
Lee and Park addressed that by looking at the records of surgeons who had gone to elite medical schools and had certified expertise. And here’s the finding that I care about: These surgeons improved longer; they were able to endure a higher number of fatalities before their performance began to decline. Lee and Park theorized that these surgeons are more resilient in the face of failure, since they believe that they can take steps (training, education) to continue to improve.
The Exception that Proves the Failure Rule
In studies of those who were the greatest in their fields (athletic, artistic, and business), the highly accomplished did often explain that a previous failure had propelled their subsequent success. These losers-turned-GOATs said that they were absolutely obsessed with the previous failure.
They analyzed it constantly and thought about every single aspect, not to beat themselves up, but so that they never made the same mistakes again.
So process over feelings. Belief that effort can change the outcome.
In Your Sight: Tips and Tricks for Learning from Failure
Think about failures as communicating information about progress (e.g. “I can practice more”) rather than failure as a test of commitment (“Why was I even doing this in the first place?”)
Focus on the process.
To get past the hurt or embarrassment, try thinking about the error in the third person, as if it had been done by someone else. (He/she rather than I/we).
Focus on what was/is under their control, rather than what was not. (You might start with, “You chose to be here. You succeeded in that, rather than deciding not to even try.”)
Ask the person who failed to motivate someone else who is struggling. This can give them a sense that they still can succeed if they follow their own advice.
Put it in the context of expertise, success, etc.
For those who fail but don’t seem engaged in changing behavior, add a social component—so that they can see how their failure impacted people around them.
Highlight the information someone can learn.
Try various counterfactuals about the failure event, conjecturing that if X had happened, this would have been the result, If Y had happened, If Z…. to help identify the truly useful takeaways.
We should all share more about our failures. This can reduce the stigma of failing, but that’s not the only reason to do it. Since failure is atypical, negative reviews tend to be more analytical and specific which leads to more learning.
For example, in a study where people were asked to read positive and negative reviews of movies before their releases, the participants could predict the films’ future box office or Oscar success—or failure—based on the negative reviews but not the positive ones.
Yet, in practice, we look for the positive Amazon, Yelp, etc., reviews, not the negative ones, when deciding where to go eat or which items to buy.
And be like Andrea Spendolini-Sirieix’s dad.
For further reading, check out:
“You Think Failure Is Hard? So Is Learning From It” by Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Waldman
The Exaggerated Benefits of Failure” by Lauren Eskreis-Winkler et al.
“Learning from Failure,” by Ryan Carlson and Ayelet Fishback
“Not Learning from Failure—the Greatest Failure of All,” by Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Waldman
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Awesome article. Very valuable tips and I’ll be thinking about this as I continue to win and lose, big and small!
Great questions. I often thought that when someone does Not learn from Failure, perhaps that person is Not ready to learn?
Regarding the Paris Olympics, I think all of the athletes, who made it to the Paris Olympics, accomplished a lot. Even if some of them did Not win a medal, they Still got to visit Paris AND they all got FREE health care in the Olympic Village! I wonder if free health care will be offered in the Olympic village in LA in 2028?
Just learned that my father was training for the 1960 Olympics when his lung collapsed and had to be removed. He lived the rest of his life with one remaining lung. He did not make it to the Olympics, yet he remained athletic for the rest of his life.