We learn more from failure than we do from success.
We’ve all heard this.
A search for the phrase “learning from failure” produces hundreds of similarly titled articles espousing the virtues of failure as the path to personal progress.
In Kim Scott’s pragmatic and often-referenced book on feedback, Radical Candor, she mentions this idea as the crux of her feedback argument.
To learn, there must be suffering. The greater the suffering, the greater the learning.
The story of overcoming failure is an alluring one. Maybe you blew the championship game in Little League or choked on a presentation to the board and bounced back better the next time.
“I learned more from that experience than I would have otherwise” is something we might expect to hear.
Those types of experiences are powerful. They do tend to stay with us.
But do we really learn as much from them as we think?
The science tells a different story.
Failure Makes Us Retreat
Researchers have studied the failures of small businesses and startups. Not surprisingly, failure rates are high. Some estimates show 50% of new businesses shut down within five years.
The story we often tell—especially in the U.S.—is that successful firms learned from their early failures. These failures caused important strategic shifts that led to success.
But what about the firms that didn’t make it? Did they not fail?
Not exactly.
It turns out they did fail—a lot. They just didn’t learn. They kept failing until those failures became catastrophic.
Small failures didn’t lead to learning; they led to bigger failures.
At the individual level, the evidence is even stronger.
From one meta-analysis:
“Our society celebrates failure as a teachable moment. Yet in five studies (total N = 1,674), failure did the opposite: it undermined learning.”
(Eskreis-Winkler & Fishbach, 2019)
Other studies show that when our errors are highlighted over our successes, we retreat:
- Failure challenges the ego, so we protect ourselves through avoidance.
- One-third of feedback is immediately dismissed as not our fault.
- Success is attributed to skill; failure is attributed to external circumstances.
- Test scores highlighting errors (vs. correct answers) lead to more errors and lower confidence.
So why does this desire for the story, of suffering to be such an integral part of learning, continue to persist?
Failure Is Sticky
There’s no doubt that failure gets our attention.
I once took a stand-up comedy class. (As I write this, it sounds as dorky as it felt.) I fancied myself as someone with a good sense of humor, so I thought I’d learn a thing or two.
There is no feedback like a quiet audience after a joke.
The goal is clear: make them laugh.
And you failed.
These types of negative events are psychologically stronger than positive ones (Baumeister et al., 2001).
Regret is one of our most powerful emotions. It sticks. That’s why the dumb thing you said twenty years ago still pops in your head at night. And regret is often the emotion that stirs after failure.
But regret is not the same as learning.
If we're being honest about the simple moments of failure in life, they rarely lead to change.
You might have an awkward social interaction at dinner with coworkers. Do you go out and learn everything about social interactions? Not likely. Instead, you tell yourself you’re just awkward. Or even better, that person is the one who is really awkward.
Got feedback about your tone in a meeting? Do you immediately go out and soften? No, you think to yourself, “Boy these people are really sensitive.”
All these failures are data. Failures show potential errors that could be remedied. But as the research shows, we spend most of our time avoiding the recognition that these are even errors to begin with.
In the amateur standup circuit, it's not uncommon for a comedian to keep trying to tell a joke that doesn't get laughs, because in his head he swears its funny.
Failure (or feedback) surfaces an error.
But what happens after is a mixed bag.
A Culture of Failure
Our views of failure are shaped by culture.
In the U.S., Protestant roots still influence our narratives.
We love stories of suffering, hard work, and triumph. “Learning from failure” is one more way we get to tell that story.
Our ego-protective mechanisms are skilled at crafting these narratives. Our brains will find any explanation that avoids the conclusion of pure failure or incompetence.
If failure leads to learning—if it’s necessary or even advantageous—we feel better about it.
And that’s useful. This story helps us tolerate failure more adeptly.
This is a good feature of our psychology. If we weren’t able to contextualize and spin the story of our failures, we wouldn’t do anything big or challenging. Failure is an essential part of life, not because it’s how we learn best, but because we don’t have all the answers. It’s necessary simply because we are flawed and the world is complex.
Failure Is an Opportunity
Acknowledging the psychological jiu-jitsu one must engage in to dismiss failure and feedback is an important step to making use of it.
When I first jumped on that stage to do standup, it became clear that I needed more skill. The error had surfaced.
But the only way to get better is to learn how to tell better jokes, not just experience more failure. Iteration, practice, and watching others is what got me my first laugh, not silence from the audience.
Stronger was the urge to learn how to make people laugh, than to avoid the pain of silence.
It’s important we begin to reframe the practice as the most important step, not the failure.
On average, from what all the research shows, you’re better off focusing on what you’re doing well and learning how to do more of that than you are focusing on your errors.
But if you encounter a failure, you can still make use of it.
- Give yourself some time to acknowledge and accept it. If you can’t do this, it’s likely you can't learn from it.
- Identify what could help you be more successful in a similar, future situation.
- Actively work to build that skill, knowledge, attitude, and behavior while recognizing positive changes, not mistakes.
