Envisioning Failure

Our brains mix real imagery with mental and emotional baggage, which affects performance. Slugger Mickey Mantle is reported to have once said after hitting a long home run, "I just saw the ball as big as a grapefruit." In contrast, poor hitters may see the baseball as small. It’s not just out of reach for them physically but emotionally as well.

A Purdue University study tested the kicking ability of more than 20 athletes who don't play football. They were asked to estimate the size of the goalposts before and after each of 10 attempts to kick a field goal. The more successful the athlete, the more likely they were to overestimate the size of the posts and underestimate the distance.

Success biased the kickers’ perception of the difficulty of their task. Professor Jessica Witt says, “Before you kicked, you really didn’t know what your abilities were going to be.’’ She found the same effect in past experiments with softball players and golfers. University of Virginia psychologist Dennis Proffitt has put together tests that show the effect holds true even when it comes to dangerous situations.

Which are you imagining in your life—success or failure?

Stephen Goforth

Success is Misleading

The Misconception: You should focus on the successful if you wish to become successful. 

The Truth: When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure and success may also become invisible.

David McRaney, Survivorship Bias

Setbacks: Failure or a Sign of Learning?

A decade long study published in Harvard Business Review set out to identify the specific attributes that differentiate high-performing CEOs. The researchers found:

CEOs who considered setbacks to be failures had 50% less chance of thriving. Successful CEOs, on the other hand, would offer unabashedly matter-of-fact accounts of where and why they had come up short and give specific examples of how they tweaked their approach to do better next time. Similarly, aspiring CEOs who demonstrated this kind of attitude (what Stanford’s Carol Dweck calls a “growth mindset”) were more likely to make it to the top of the pyramid: Nearly 90% of the strong CEO candidates we reviewed scored high on dealing with setbacks.

Read more about the CEO Genome Project in the Harvard Business Review

Success

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much;

who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children;

who has filled his niche and accomplished his task;

who has left the world better than he found it whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem or a rescued soul;

who has never lacked appreciation of Earth's beauty or failed to express it;

who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had;whose life was an inspiration;

whose memory a benediction.

Bessie Anderson Stanley

Here's how you can spot who is going to be successful

(Some researchers ran) a workshop for low-performing seven graders at a New York City junior high school, teaching them about the brain and about effective study techniques. Half the group also received a presentation on memory, but the other half were given an explanation of how the brain changes as a result of effortful learning: that when you try hard and learn something new, the brain forms new connections, and these new connections, over time, make you smarter. This group was told that intellectual development is not the natural unfolding of intelligence but results from the new connections that are formed through effort and learning.

After the workshop, both groups of kids filtered back into their classwork. Their teachers were unaware that some had been taught that effortful learning changes the brain, but as the school year unfolded, those students adopted what (the researchers) call a "growth mindset," a belief that their intelligence was largely within their own control, and they went on to become much more aggressive learners and higher achievers than students from the first group, who continued to hold the conventional view, what (the researchers) called a "fixed mindset" that they're intellectual ability was set at birth by the natural talents they were born with.

(The) research had been triggered by curiosity over why some people become helpless when they encounter challenges and fail at them, whereas others respond to failure by trying new strategies and redoubling their effort. (They) found that a fundamental difference between the two responses lies in how a person attributes failure: those who attribute to their own inability-"I'm not intelligent"-become helpless. Those who interpret failure as a result of insufficient effort or an ineffective strategy dig deeper and try different approaches.

Peter C. Brown and Henry L. Roediger III,, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

Self-Control as a Child

Behaving yourself as a child brings big rewards in adulthood. Researchers tracked more than 1,000 people from toddlerhood into their early 30s and found that the more self-control they showed as kids, the healthier, wealthier, and happier they were as grown-ups. By contrast, children who struggled to complete tasks and handle frustration without lashing out at their peers were more likely to be overweight, drug dependent, and ridden with debt as adults. The study’s authors say that self-control can be taught and nurtured with practice, and that no matter what a child’s circumstances, “good parenting can improve self-control and improve life success.”

The Week Magazine

This is more important than IQ when it comes to success

Some students aim at performance goals, while others strive toward learning goals. In the first case, you're working to validate your ability. In the second, you're working to acquire new knowledge or skills. People with performance goals unconsciously limit their potential. If your focus is on validating or showing off your ability, you pick challenges you're confident you can meet. You want to look smart, so you do the same stunt over and over again. But if your goal is to increase your ability, you pick ever-increasing challenges, and you interpret setbacks as useful information helps you to sharpen your focus, get more creative and work hard.

More than IQ, it's discipline, grit, and a growth mindset that imbue a person with a sense of possibility and the creativity and persistence needed for higher learning and success. Study skills and learning skills are inert until they're powered by an active ingredient the active ingredient is the simple but nonetheless profound realization the power to increase your abilities lies largely within your own control.

Peter C. Brown and Henry L. Roediger III, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

The Green Lumber Fallacy

A fellow made in fortune in green lumber without knowing what appears to be essential details about the product he traded—he wasn’t aware that green lumber stood for freshly cut wood, not lumber that was painted green.  

Meanwhile, by contrast, the person who related the story went bankrupt while knowing every intimate detail about the green lumber, which includes the physical, economic, and other aspects of the commodity.

The fallacy is that what one may need to know in the real world does not necessarily match what one can perceive through intellect: it doesn’t mean that details are not relevant, only that those we tend to believe are important constitute a distraction away from more central attributes to the price mechanism.  

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The virtues not listed on your resume

David Brooks, in his book, The Road to Character (Random House), distinguishes between what he calls "résumé virtues" and "eulogy virtues." The former are the skills that get you good grades, good jobs, nice houses, and hefty bank accounts. The latter are what make you a good person. Though I think the distinction between skills and virtues is an important one, Brooks is wrong to imply that résumé virtues are all that we need to produce excellence at work, or that eulogy virtues are for what comes after one’s work has ceased. Eulogy virtues are just as important to becoming good doctors, good lawyers, good teachers, good nurses, good physical therapists, and even good bankers as are résumé virtues. And they are also important to becoming good children, parents, spouses, friends, and citizens. As Aristotle knew, virtue is needed for material success just as it is needed for moral success.

Barry Schwartz writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education

Self-Made Failures

Occasionally, I’ve seen a man stand up and say, “I’m a self-made man.” So far I’ve never seen the guy or gal who DIDN'T make it, stand up and say, “I’m a self-made failure.” You know what they do? They point the index finger and say, “I’m not successful or happy because of my parents.” Some say, “My wife or husband doesn’t understand me.” Some blame the teacher, the preacher or the boss. Some blame everything from skin color and religious beliefs to lack of education and physical deficiencies. Some say they’re too old or too young, too fat or too slim, too tall or too short, or that they live in the wrong place.

Zig Ziglar, See You at the Top

We can be too clever for our own good

Unthinking is the ability to apply years of learning at the crucial moment by removing your thinking self from the equation. Its power is not confined to sport: actors and musicians know about it too, and are apt to say that their best work happens in a kind of trance. Thinking too much can kill not just physical performance but mental inspiration. Bob Dylan, wistfully recalling his youthful ability to write songs without even trying, described the making of “Like a Rolling Stone” as a “piece of vomit, 20 pages long”. It hasn’t stopped the song being voted the best of all time.

In less dramatic ways the same principle applies to all of us. A fundamental paradox of human psychology is that thinking can be bad for us. When we follow our own thoughts too closely, we can lose our bearings, as our inner chatter drowns out common sense. A study of shopping behaviour found that the less information people were given about a brand of jam, the better the choice they made. When offered details of ingredients, they got befuddled by their options and ended up choosing a jam they didn’t like.

If a rat is faced with a puzzle in which food is placed on its left 60% of the time and on the right 40% of the time, it will quickly deduce that the left side is more rewarding, and head there every time, thus achieving a 60% success rate. Young children adopt the same strategy. When Yale undergraduates play the game, they try to figure out some underlying pattern, and end up doing worse than the rat or the child. We really can be too clever for our own good.

Ian Leslie, writing in The Economist

Owning the Failure, too

We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perceptions of random events. We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. We feel responsible for the good stuff but not for the bad. This causes us to think that we are better than other at whatever we do for a living. 

The Black Swain, Nassim Taleb

Living on Past Victories

Never take it for granted that your past successes will continue into the future. Actually, your past successes are your biggest obstacle: every battle, every war, is different and you cannot assume what worked before will work today. You must cut yourself loose from the past and open your eyes to the present. Your tendency to fight the last war may lead to your final war.

Robert Green, The 33 Strategies of War

Here’s how you can tell who will do well in College

The best predictor of who will do well in college is not how smart the student is but their understanding of intelligence: Is it something the student puts on display or is it something that changes with learning?

Many first-year college students are settling into their dorms and getting ready for classes this week. I like to show my students a news story I wrote in graduate school covered in red marks. When that paper was returned to me, I could have said to myself, "I can't do this" or I could adjust, trying different strategies and working out what I needed to do to improve. The first attitude assumes either I can do it or I can't. If you can, you do it immediately. You show your intellegence. The second attitude assumes success is a matter of approach and persistence. You have to ask what might be perceived as dumb questions until you figure it out. When I wrote that paper covered in red marks (and there were many of them) I had no idea I was just a few years away from working at a national news network where writing would be a central part of my job. 

Stephen Goforth  

Know your Perfectionist

A study measured three types of perfectionism: self-oriented, or a desire to be perfect; socially prescribed, or a desire to live up to others’ expectations; and other-oriented, or holding others to unrealistic standards. A person living with an other-oriented perfectionist might feel criticized by the perfectionist spouse for not doing household chores exactly the “right” way. Socially prescribed perfectionism is “My self-esteem is contingent on what other people think.”

Perfectionists tend to devalue their accomplishments, so that every time a goal is achieved, the high lasts only a short time, like “a gas tank with a hole in it.” 

There are also different ways perfectionism manifests. Some perfectionists are the sleeping-bag-toting self-flagellants, always pushing themselves forward. But others actually fall behind on work, unable to complete assignments unless they’re, well, perfect. Or they might self-sabotage, handicapping their performance ahead of time. They’re the ones partying until 2 a.m. the night before the final, so that when the C rolls in, there’s a ready excuse. Anything to avoid facing your own imperfections.

Olga Khazan writing in The Atlantic

The Growth Mindset

When people believe that failure is not a barometer of innate characteristics but rather view it as a step to success (a growth mindset), they are far more likely to put in the kinds of effort that will eventually lead to that success. By contrast, those who believe that success or failure is due to innate ability (a fixed mindset) can find that this leads to a fear of failure and a lack of effort.

Carl Hendrick writing in Aeon

Career Success is Not Enough

Success spares you from the shame you might experience if you feel yourself a failure, but career success alone does not provide positive peace or fulfillment. If you build your life around it, your ambitions will always race out in front of what you’ve achieved, leaving you anxious and dissatisfied.

David Brooks writing in The New York Times

Lies our Culture Tells Us

College mental health facilities are swamped, suicide rates are spiking, the president’s repulsive behavior is tolerated or even celebrated by tens of millions of Americans. At the root of it all is the following problem: We’ve created a culture based on lies.    

(Among them:) Rich and successful people are worth more than poorer and less successful people. We pretend we don’t tell this lie, but our whole meritocracy points to it. The message of the meritocracy is that you are what you accomplish. The false promise of the meritocracy is that you can earn dignity by attaching yourself to prestigious brands. The emotion of the meritocracy is conditional love — that if you perform well, people will love you.      

No wonder it’s so hard to be a young adult today. No wonder our society is fragmenting. We’ve taken the lies of hyper-individualism and we’ve made them the unspoken assumptions that govern how we live.

David Brooks writing in The New York Times

Self-awareness and Expert Performance

Expert performance is built through thousands of hours of practice in your area of expertise, in varying conditions, through which you accumulate a vast library of such mental models that enables you to correctly discern a given situation and instantaneously select and execute the correct response.

At the root of our effectiveness is our ability to grasp the world around us and to take the measure of our own performance. We are constantly making judgments about what we know and don't know whether we're capable of handling a task or solving a problem. As we work at something, we keep an eye on ourselves, adjusting our thinking or actions as we progress.

Monitoring your own thinking is what psychologists call metacognition (meta is Greek for "about".) Learning to be accurate self-observers helps us stay out of blind alleys, make good decisions, and reflect on how we might do better next time. An important part of this skill is being sensitive to the ways we can delude ourselves. One problem with poor judgment is that we usually don't know when we've got it. Another problem is the sheer scope of the ways our judgment can be led astray.

Peter C. Brown and Henry L. Roediger III, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

Wings are best grown after you jump off the cliff anyway

Life after college is like getting hit by a bus you didn’t see coming because you were too busy texting to look both ways before crossing the street. And why would you? You’ve crossed that street every single day at the exact same time for 20 years and a bus has never run over you before. Here’s the thing: Up until this point, your entire life has been hinged upon a concept of preparation and reward. You study for a test, you get a good grade. You exhibit good behavior, you don’t get thrown in detention. You do your chores, you get an allowance. 

The real world doesn’t really care about any of that. Sometimes you fail when you should have succeeded. Sometimes you’re punished when you’ve done nothing wrong. Sometimes you lose, even when you did everything in your power to win. So lay down your ego and stop waving that degree around like it’s a Get Out Of Jail Free card. Jump in. Grow your wings.

Alex McDaniel