There are few massive success stories that didn’t start out with some sort of failure.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — now the second richest man in the world — had multiple failed attempts at building a platform for third-party sellers to list their products before founding the e-tail giant. Olympic champion gymnast Gabby Douglas credits her missteps on the floor for helping her adopt a resilient attitude.
“It’s gonna sound weird, but success for me was failing,” she told CNBC Make It. “It was falling seven times. It was making mistakes. That way, I could go back in the gym and be like, ‘Okay, what do we need to work on to make sure all areas are covered and shored up?'”
Failure being a catalyst to success is well-documented. But why failing can lead to better future outcomes is generally misunderstood, says Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of “Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well.”
“There’s one really important misconception about failing, which is that failure and mistake are the same thing,” she says.
A failure, she says, is when you properly use your knowledge and resources to accomplish a goal, but it just doesn’t pan out. A mistake, on the other hand, is when you stray from a process proven to lead to success.
If you’re baking a cake and accidentally leave out the eggs, that’s a mistake. If you’re creating an entirely new recipe and it doesn’t taste the way you hoped it would, that’s a “productive failure” because it probably taught you something about how to improve the cake on your next attempt.
“There is a lot of happy talk out there about how we should celebrate mistakes,” Edmondson says. “We should celebrate productive failures.”
If you’re pursuing a new hobby or switching into a different role at work, know that failure is likely ahead. And that’s OK, Edmondson says, as long as you learned something from the process. A productive failure meets four criteria, Edmondson says.
4 pillars of productive failure
- Takes place in new territory: You’re diving into a project or a field where you have no prior experience. “If I decide to write a brand new book that doesn’t yet exist, it’s new territory, by definition, and there will be failures,” Edmondson says.
- Working toward a goal: You’re clear about what you want to accomplish. This can help you act with intention and track your progress.
- Backed by research: Just because something is new to you doesn’t mean you have to go into it blind. Do some homework on where someone at your skill level should start.
- No bigger than necessary: Don’t exhaust your resources on a project you’re just learning how to approach. “Let’s say you have a brand new product,” Edmonson says. “We don’t know whether it will work or whether customers will like it. What you don’t do is announce to the whole world, ‘We got this new product’ and roll it out at scale.” Instead, take baby steps toward your goal so you can course correct as needed.
By reframing failure as an essential part of the learning process, you can feel inspired by it, as opposed to discouraged.
“We should celebrate the new bits of knowledge that disappointingly came because you were wrong about a hypothesis,” Edmondson says.
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