How Good Is Your Learning from Failure?

Are you one that likes to do new things in order to learn how to do it … like Pablo Picasso in this quote? Or do you hesitate because of fear of failure? Perhaps you do not realize that your best learning comes from learning from failure?

I am always doing that what I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

Pablo Picasso

From an early age, we are taught it’s bad to make mistakes and they need to be avoided … otherwise, there can be unpleasant consequences. The truth, however, is that failure and making mistakes is a necessary part of success and it cannot be avoided.

It can only be avoided if you decide to “play it safe” for the rest of your life and if you are happy to remain in your comfort zone and stop expanding and enjoying the exhilarating feeling of continuous growth and development.

But, that’s not really what you want, right?

Failure is a critical part of learning, yet not all of us learn about the importance of failure.  There are three kinds of failure, and two of them are good. 

Learn the tradeoff between effort and accuracy.  In general, the more work you put into any task, the better you will perform it.  Put too much work into a task, though, and you have spent valuable time that could have been used elsewhere.  So, it is valuable to calibrate the amount of effort a task is worth. 

Second, even you put in enough effort, sometimes you still get something wrong.  This kind of failure is the best learning opportunity.  We need to reward effort.  We need to understand that every mistake is a learning opportunity. 

An error may have immediate consequences, but that does not mean that they cannot learn from that error.  The most successful people are not the ones who never fail, they are the ones who learn most effectively from their failures. 

Third, there is negligence.  Some people consistently fail to put in any significant effort in their work.  Negligence is a bad kind of failure because these mistakes are not ones that we can learn from.  Instead, it prohibits learning of any kind. Negligence is the only kind of failure that is truly unacceptable.

Here is an excellent example:

When author J. K. Rowling addressed the graduating class at Harvard, she didn’t focus on success. Instead, she spoke about failure. She related a story about a young woman who gave up her dream of writing novels to study something more practical.

Nonetheless, she ended up as an unemployed single mom “as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless.” But during this rock-bottom time, she realized she still had a wonderful daughter, an old typewriter, and an idea that would become the foundation for rebuilding her life. Perhaps you’ve heard of Harry Potter?

“You might never fail on the scale I did,” Rowling told that privileged audience. “But it is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default.

So here are three good reasons on why failing is a good thing:

No failing/no learning

If you are not failing, you are not learning.

Take a good look at these 2 columns of words.

It’s as if, in those few seconds, your memory skills suddenly sharpened. When you encountered the words with blank spaces, something both imperceptible and profound happened. You stopped. You stumbled ever so briefly, then figured it out. You experienced a microsecond of struggle, and that microsecond made all the difference. You didn’t practice harder when you looked at column B. You practiced deeper.

Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways – operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes – makes you smarter.

Growth mindset

The concept is a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. With a growth mindset, people believe anyone can master anything as long as they work hard enough. With a fixed mindset, people believe talent comes from the ingrained ability.

It is interesting to note that both mindsets can be changed by six simple words. Half of a set of kids were praised for their intelligence (“You must be smart at this”), and half were praised for their effort (“You must have worked really hard”).

The praised-for-effort group improved their initial score by 30 percent, while the praised-for-intelligence group’s score declined by 20 percent. All because of six short words.

Response to academic failure – a poor test grade in a new course. Those with the growth mindset said they would study harder for the next test. Those with a fixed mindset said they would study less for the next test. If you don’t have the ability, why waste your time? Which group do you want to be in?

Experimentation 

Try many solution options and learn from them all. Never rely on just one approach. The thing is that there is no such thing as a failure … consider all alternatives as experiments.

Capture failure and turn it into skill. The trick is to choose a goal just beyond your present abilities. With experimentation, it is not what you look for that matters, but what you find. With experimentation, it is a lot about learning and failure.

 Let us share with you a great story to illustrate what we mean. It is about a pottery class and building the perfect piece of pottery.

There once was a potter who was teaching pottery making to a class of 20 students. As an experiment, the potter split the class into 2 groups, giving each group a simple yet different objective. His hope was to teach his class something about learning and its relationship to creativity and failure.

For group 1, the objective he gave was for each student to make one perfect pot.

For group 2, his objective was for each student to use up 100 lbs of clay.

The first group struggled, working on one pot days on end. Most failed to get it right.

The second group went through a lot of clay and experimented and failed often. But through failure, they also iterated, learned, and perfected technique. By the end most had several perfect pots.

There are two important lessons from this experiment.

First, it is important to consider the enablers of the (sometimes hidden) motivation that you employ.

Second, is the importance of not being concerned with failure (i.e. the importance of failure as a means of learning a new skill).

The bottom line

What we found most interesting in this concept is its simplicity. Making the simple complicated is commonplace … but making the complicated simple, awesomely simple is real creativity!

Lots of ideas are being generated and the process is definitely great at customer engagement. We believe its success will generate more business experimentation.

What do you think about this experiment in learning, motivation, and failure?  Were the experiment results what you expected?

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.

It’s up to you to keep improving your ability to learning to learn. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.

When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.

Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to continually improving your continuous learning?

Do you have a lesson about making your learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.  

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.  

More reading on continuous learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library: 

Aware of These Amazing Facts on Innovation?

Creative Collaboration is the Solution for the Toughest Business Problems

Ideas on Learning Reform and Its Instructional Implications