Why you need to fail...

Written on Tuesday, July 07, 2009 by Siddharth PV

Great post by Peter Bregman at HarvardBusiness.org :

 

Excerpts:

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A muscle only grows if you work it till it fails. You need to use more challenging weights. You need to fail."

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Every time I ask a room of executives to list the top five moments their career took a leap forward — not just a step, but a leap — failure is always on the list. For some it was the loss of a job. For others it was a project gone bad. And for others still it was the failure of a larger system, like an economic downturn, that required them to step up.

Yet most of us spend a tremendous effort trying to avoid even the possibility of failure.

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If you believe that your talents are inborn or fixed, then you will try to avoid failure at all costs because failure is proof of your limitation. People with a fixed mindset like to solve the same problems over and over again. It reinforces their sense of competence.

 

But if you believe your talent grows with persistence and effort, then you seek failure as an opportunity to improve. People with a growth mindset feel smart when they're learning, not when they're flawless.

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Michael Jordan, arguably the world's best basketball player, has a growth mindset. Most successful people do. In high school he was cut from the basketball team but that obviously didn't discourage him: "I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career, I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I've been trusted to take the game wining shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

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Want to increase your own performance? Set high goals where you have a 50-70% chance of success. According to Psychologist and Harvard researcher the late David McClelland, that's the sweet spot for high achievers. Then, when you fail half the time, figure out what you should do differently and try again. That's practice. And according to recent studies, 10,000 hours of that kind of practice will make you an expert in anything. No matter where you start.

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Key takeaways:

Try more stuff all the time. More importantly, try different stuff all the time. Know that you might fail. Its okay – just make sure you learn from it.

The real growth always happens outside our area of comfprt.

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2 Comments

  1. Dinesh_Corner | July 7, 2009 at 11:27 AM

    and after a while these failures become challenges and you start taking up more of these. And sooner or later we start succeeding at those.Thereafter these challenges are mere stepping stones to success.so Failures become pillar to success. and when you success rate has crossed the mid way we call " nothing succeeds like success"

     
  2. Vinit | July 8, 2009 at 9:47 PM

    just one thing; there is a down side to failures...and that is the cost of a failure.......in case of an investement it will be a financial cost, incase of something sporty, it can be a physical cost......in case of social events there is a cost of reputation.....i know its ok when people laugh at you........but some things are not reversible !!!

     

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Why you need to fail...

Great post by Peter Bregman at HarvardBusiness.org :

 

Excerpts:

---

A muscle only grows if you work it till it fails. You need to use more challenging weights. You need to fail."

---

Every time I ask a room of executives to list the top five moments their career took a leap forward — not just a step, but a leap — failure is always on the list. For some it was the loss of a job. For others it was a project gone bad. And for others still it was the failure of a larger system, like an economic downturn, that required them to step up.

Yet most of us spend a tremendous effort trying to avoid even the possibility of failure.

---

If you believe that your talents are inborn or fixed, then you will try to avoid failure at all costs because failure is proof of your limitation. People with a fixed mindset like to solve the same problems over and over again. It reinforces their sense of competence.

 

But if you believe your talent grows with persistence and effort, then you seek failure as an opportunity to improve. People with a growth mindset feel smart when they're learning, not when they're flawless.

---

Michael Jordan, arguably the world's best basketball player, has a growth mindset. Most successful people do. In high school he was cut from the basketball team but that obviously didn't discourage him: "I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career, I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I've been trusted to take the game wining shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

---

Want to increase your own performance? Set high goals where you have a 50-70% chance of success. According to Psychologist and Harvard researcher the late David McClelland, that's the sweet spot for high achievers. Then, when you fail half the time, figure out what you should do differently and try again. That's practice. And according to recent studies, 10,000 hours of that kind of practice will make you an expert in anything. No matter where you start.

---


Key takeaways:

Try more stuff all the time. More importantly, try different stuff all the time. Know that you might fail. Its okay – just make sure you learn from it.

The real growth always happens outside our area of comfprt.