Fail to Grow

I forgot if I caught this off of Twitter or off one of my feeds, but Peter Bregman writing for Harvard Business wrote an interesting article on why you need to fail. Why if you never fail, you can’t ever really grow.

It turns out the answer is deceptively simple. It’s all in your head.

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.

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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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Here’s the good news: you can change your success by changing your mindset. When Dweck trained children to view themselves as capable of growing their intelligence, they worked harder, more persistently, and with greater success on math problems they had previously abandoned as unsolvable.

I’ve said it many times, that one thing that every student needs to do in Higher Ed and arguably in k-12 as well is to fail and realize that it is not the end of the world and by failing, learning where they might have a potential boundary. Personally, I remember bombing a research project in Grade 4 and my teacher told me that I had to redo it. I did and I knocked it out of the park and continued to get high grades for the rest of my k-12 career. I remember failing my first Calc course in university and though it didn’t have the same magical grade elevating effect that my G4 experience did, it showed me that even in the “everything is really important now” environment of higher ed, you could get a second try and prove to yourself that what didn’t kill you made you stronger. I’m sure everyone reading this will have similar stories in school and elsewhere in their lives, and I would argue that those failures are likely more memorable than all the successes that might have preceded or succeeded them.