Failure is a Valuable Resource

Imagine two people who are for all intents and purposes identical, or identical enough. And imagine you’ve put them in separate rooms and given them a task to perform that they’ve never attempted before or even considered how to do it, and you ask them to make 10 separate attempts to complete the task. The first person, Mr. Winner, thinks about it, makes his best guess as to how to achieve the objective, and gets it right on his first try! Happy with himself, and feeling quite proud, he repeats his same strategy 9 more times. 10 successes! The second person, Mr. Loser, thinks about it as well, and thinks he may have a winning strategy, but he tries it, and it doesn’t work. He double-checks his math, tries to understand what went wrong, thinks about it some more, and tries something a little different. This attempt fails as well., and now he’s consternated. He makes a change and tries a third time and that fails, too. He considers that maybe his whole approach is off and thinks of a different tactic to try. Still no dice. For 9 attempts, he tries and fails to meet the object, and finally, on the 10th try, he finally gets it right, , just barely making the cutoff, and breathes a sigh of relief

Traditionally, our society would suggest that if you now want to hire someone to perform that task on a regular basis, you should hire Mr Winner since he’s had so much more success than Mr. Loser. But consider this. Which one of the two would you expect to better understand the problem better at this point?. Which one is likely to be able to adjust if a slightly different version of the problem pops up? Mr. Winner may find a situation where his tried and true method just doesn’t work - where some small facet is just different enough that he sequence results in error. If so, he’s right back at the drawing board. Mr. Loser, on the other hand, not only has a method for how to make it work, but also knows all the reasons why it works (and all the ways that don’t) and has a deeper knowledge of which factors are instrumental, and which are merely decorative or nice-to-haves. He likely understands the problem space at a mechanical level. He not only knows what works, he knows why it works.

We’ve all been taught at some level to think of success and failure as polar opposites, like hot and cold or light and dark. Where one cannot coexist with the other. But that’s not the true nature of success and failure’s relationship with each other. Success is the goal, yes. It is always the target we are aiming at, and failure is not as good as success. But it is not negative momentum. Failure does not pull us away from success. It pulls us towards it. This is because each failure, no matter how minor or how disastrous, teaches you something. It’s nearly impossible to experience a failure without gaining some new knowledge about the problem space. Each failure increases your understanding, and thusly increases your chance of success on the following attempts. In a very real sense, you could envision that every success has a prerequisite, but finite number of failures before it shows up. This can be a wholly different flavor of experience. It turns each failure from “I’m such a loser,” into “Ok, one down.”

I’m not the first person to recognize this. You can find similar sentiments out there among the learned and especially espoused by the successful. But perhaps it bears repeating.

Failure is a valuable resource.