Being Smart About How You Learn to Recover From Failure
Just because you accept failure as part of the process does not mean you accept failure. It just means you accept that winning all the time is not good for you. If you always win, then you’re not pushing yourself to your limits and you’re not growing. Therefore, if you fail at failing, you will fail at getting better.
With that said, the process of pushing yourself to, and ultimately past your limits is not a process of consistent progress. Instead, it’s the process of taking a few steps forward, and fewer steps backward.
To put it differently, each time you take a new step forward you leave your comfort zone, and each step beyond your comfort zone increases your chances of failure.
Moreover, if you know failure will eventually be part of the process you can be smart about how you learn to recover from failure. This will allow you to limit the steps backward you take before you start moving forward again.
How to Learn from Failure So You Fail Forward
We all know the concept of failing forward. Using failure as an opportunity to learn is basically as cliché as it gets in the self-help world. But as cliché as it may be, the opportunity to learn from failure remains just that, an opportunity. Furthermore, learning from failure is an opportunity most people don’t take advantage of because learning from failure is hard.
So, if you really want to fail forward by learning from failure, I suggest you start with the research from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. This research suggests that to learn from failure you must do at least 2 things.
First and foremost, if you want to learn from failure, you must “tune-in” as the researchers describe it. Going through the motions just doesn’t cut it. Learning from failure requires paying close attention to the details and separating the ego from the causes of failure. This means focusing intensely on the causes of failure that are under one’s control and not using what one doesn’t control to excuse the failure. To put it differently, those who have big egos, make excuses, and ignore details don’t learn from failure.
Secondly, to learn from failure, you must also experience success. In fact, the University of Chicago research strongly supports that you learn more from success than failure. This suggests the need for a trial-and-error process that supports incremental corrections pushing one in the right direction. Failure followed by more failure will not support learning. Instead, failure followed by success then more failure and then more success is a more realistic process. While one can’t always engineer a trial-and-error process in the real world, a progression of difficulty or a breakdown of goals into logical bites is possible.
Do these two things, and failure will be your friend.