Learning through Failure

Each year as the New Year begins, I reflect on what I accomplished last year, what I could have done better, and how I can be better this year. I imagine many of us do the same, making resolutions to learn more and to be better in some aspect of our lives. As I have been thinking about this, my thoughts keep returning to one book, Black Box Thinking, by Matthew Syed. It’s been several years since I first read the book, but I’ve really never stopped thinking about it.

The basic premise is that for the most part our culture stigmatizes failure and we constantly find ways to rationalize failure; thus, we consistently forsake opportunities to learn from what should be our best teacher. In embracing and learning from failures, we create an open-loop system that accepts, analyzes and tests failures versus the status quo closed-loop culture that stigmatizes, rationalizes, and ignores failures and deletes them from our memory banks.

One of my favorite quotes in the book is “If I want to be a great musician, first I must play a lot of bad music.” I think we can all figure out what that means, but Syed pairs it with an interesting study. Pottery students were divided into two groups and one group would be graded on the quantity of pots they produced and the second group on the quality of their pots. Guess which group in the end of the class had produced better pots?  The quantity group. They tried and failed and tried and failed…and learned…and in the end made much better pots than the quality group who spent most of their time theorizing about how to make the best pot.

So, in whatever it is you do, I’d say the moral is to redefine failure and to embrace failure and rigorously analyze failure. If you can accept failure with honesty and accompanying insight, in the end you’ll be much better at whatever it is you do. Just ask James Dyson, who built 5,127 prototype vacuums in his shed before finding one that worked as he wanted…and who now has a personal fortune of more than $4 billion. Not bad.

Each drop of experience we process and learn from enhances our ocean of knowledge.