Success is made possible by understanding how something doesn’t work, [so] prior failings may be more aptly referred to as the ruling out of possibilities.
~Peter Attia [1]
Most of my clients are CEOs, many of whom have founded a new company, and all of the rest have embarked upon similarly ambitious paths. In this context failure is inevitable--not terminal or permanent, but failure nonetheless. The failed business model. The failed strategic plan. The failed investment. The failed hire. The failed career step. The only way to avoid failure is to take no risks--which feels safer in the short term but guarantees under-performance over time.
The challenge here is threefold: See our failures clearly and acknowledge our contributions to the outcome. Study them closely to ensure we don't repeat the same mistakes. And remain sufficiently resilient to keep trying, sometimes over a period of years, while also knowing when to quit and abandon efforts that are unlikely to yield results. What does all of this look like in practice?
See Failures Clearly
There's a positive correlation between optimism and effective leadership, in part because the optimistic leader has a contagious effect on others, attracting talent and resources and making success more likely. [2] But as neuroscientist Richard Davidson has noted, the risks of excessive optimism include resistance to negative data and an inability to learn from experience. [3] Leaders who tend toward optimism have to temper their hopefulness and cultivate the capacity to acknowledge failure, which often entails a degree of "comfort with discomfort." [4] Failure won't necessarily feel good, but it doesn't need to feel overwhelming--and it may even feel liberating. The Rev. William Swing, former Episcopal Bishop of California, once said, "You learn to breathe again when you embrace failure as a part of life, not as the determining moment of life." [5]
A key here is taking responsibility for our personal contributions to the failed outcome. It's far easier to assign blame to other people or forces beyond our control. I'm not suggesting we ignore the role played by chance--as astrophysicist Carl Sagan noted, "We seek meaning, even in random numbers," and this can lead us to exaggerate our significance. [6] But we can readily err in the other direction, downplaying our agency and ignoring all the deliberate steps we took on the road to failure.
For example, despite evidence demonstrating the shortcomings of interviews in predicting performance [7], my clients understandably continue to employ the practice in their hiring processes, in part because it's an opportunity to assess a candidate's willingness to take responsibility for failure. "Tell us about a time when things went wrong" may be a clichéd question, but the response speaks volumes about the person's capacity for self-awareness and non-defensiveness.
Study Them Closely
The next step is analyzing and learning from failure, a process made easier by adopting what Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck calls a "growth mindset," in which "people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work--brains and talent are just the starting point." [8] This is in contrast to a "fixed mindset," in which we believe that our capabilities are inherent and lie beyond our ability to influence. Research by a team of psychologists led by Jason Moser of Michigan State indicates that people with a growth mindset pay closer attention to mistakes and are more likely to improve subsequent performance as a result, suggesting that one of the values of a growth mindset is that it enables us to feel less distressed by failure. [9]
A key here is recognizing the power of "mental models." Psychologists have theorized that we navigate existence through a set of envisioned scenarios and representations--mental models--and these conceptual frameworks deeply inform our experience of the world. In other words, perceptions shape reality, and that very much includes perceptions about ourselves. [10] A growth mindset is a mental model about our abilities and the meaning of mistakes, one in which we believe that our abilities are subject to change, and mistakes are learning opportunities, not character flaws. Notably, this is consistent with recent findings from neuroscience which demonstrate that the brain remains plastic throughout our lives. [11]
Making use of a growth mindset in this context requires an ongoing commitment to debriefing past experiences, a process that the British trainer and consultant Roger Greenaway maps out in four steps:
- FACTS: What happened?
- FEELINGS: What did I experience?
- FINDINGS: Why did this happen?
- FUTURES: What will I do differently? [12]
The emphasis on emotion here is deliberate and essential. Failure reliably evokes uncomfortable feelings: embarrassment, regret, even shame. Seeking to ignore or suppress such feelings is usually futile--emotions aren't subject to willful control--and the effort can even be counter-productive, heightening our discomfort and leading us to fixate on our emotional response. [13] The key is emotion regulation, which entails exploring our feelings more fully, and, whenever possible, discussing them with others. [14,15] Here again, a growth mindset can play a valuable role by mitigating our negative emotional response to failure and enabling us to examine setbacks and mistakes more closely with greater ease.
Stay Resilient...
We often misunderstand the meaning of resilience, confusing it with invulnerability or toughness. The etymological root of resilience is the Latin resilire, which means "to rebound, recoil or jump back." Resilient materials deform under pressure while retaining their internal consistency, later returning to their original form. Iron is tough, but it's not resilient--when it reaches its breaking point it shatters into pieces. Being resilient in the face of failure doesn't mean that we're unaffected by the experience. Being resilient means that we have the ability to absorb the impact of a failure, respond flexibly, adapt to the resulting stress and pressure, and persist in these efforts over time--without shattering into pieces.
Resilience can also be misconstrued as a monolithic quality we possess or lack, but research by psychologists Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatté suggests that our degree of resilience is a function of the extent to which possess certain characteristics and engage in specific behaviors:
- Emotion regulation: "Some people are prone to experience greater amounts of anxiety, sadness, and anger than others and have a harder time regaining control once they are upset. They are more likely to get stuck in their anger, sadness, or anxiety and are less effective at coping with adversity and solving problems."
- Impulse control: "If your impulse control is low, you will often accept your first impulsive belief about the situation as true and act accordingly."
- Optimism: "Optimism implies that we believe we have the ability to handle the adversities that will inevitably arise in the future."
- Causal analysis: "If we're unable to assess the causes of our problems accurately, then we are doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again... The most resilient people are those who have cognitive flexibility and can identify all of the significant causes of the adversities they face."
- Empathy: "People low in empathy, even well-intentioned ones, tend to repeat the same old nonresilient patterns of behavior, and they're known to 'bulldoze' others' emotions and desires."
- Self-efficacy: "Self-efficacy...represents our beliefs that we can solve the problems we are likely to experience and our faith in our ability to succeed."
- Reaching out: "Why are some people afraid of reaching out? For some people, it's because they learned early in life that embarrassment was to be avoided at all costs. Better to remain in one's shell, even if it means a life of mediocrity, than to expose oneself to public failure and ridicule. For others...this reflects the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of future adversity." [16]
One of the greatest values of Reivich and Shatté's framework is that it offers us a number of starting points when we feel the need to cultivate or enhance our resilience. We don't have to be exceptionally skilled in all seven domains, nor must we address all seven at once. We can choose where to focus our efforts to improve.
...And Sometimes Quit
But just as we shouldn't confuse resilience and invulnerability, we also shouldn't assume that persistent determination is the same things as permanent devotion. Because sometimes setbacks and mistakes are signs that we should quit before we experience a permanent or terminal failure, as noted by marketing expert and business author Seth Godin, who also makes an important distinction between "being resilient" and "coping":
Strategic quitting is a conscious decision you make based on the choices available to you. If you realize you're at a dead end compared with what you could be investing in, quitting is not only a reasonable choice, it's a smart one. Failing, on the other hand, means that your dream is over. Failing happens when you give up, when there are no other options, or when you quit so often that you've used up all your time and resources.
Coping is what people do when they try to muddle through. They cope with a bad job or a difficult task The problem with coping is that it never leads to exceptional performance... All coping does is waste your time and misdirect your energy. If the best you can do is cope, you're better off quitting. Quitting is better than coping because quitting frees you up to excel at something else. [17]
The Ruling Out of Possibilities
In the quote at the beginning of this essay, physician and longevity researcher Peter Attia is referring to the years of work costing untold millions that had been dedicated to a series of potential HIV vaccines that ultimately proved ineffective. These programs were judged by many to be "failures"--and yet their findings made it possible for drug researchers and manufacturers to successfully create a suite of vaccines in record time that today are the source of our greatest hope in beating back the current pandemic. So what is a failure?
Some failures are permanent and terminal, of course, and I'm not suggesting that we can simply redefine ourselves out of such circumstances. But the vast majority of our "failures" aren't nearly so consequential, and whenever we're pursuing something ambitious--in the business model, the strategic plan, the investment, the hire, the career step--we will fail, repeatedly. But in the process we are also ruling out possibilities as we seek to understand what works.
Footnotes
[1] mRNA vaccine technology: Science builds on science (Peter Attia, 2021)
[2] See Dispositional Affect and Leadership Effectiveness: A Comparison of Self-Esteem, Optimism, and Efficacy (Martin Chemers, Carl Watson, and Stephen May, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2000), and Impact of Leadership Style and Emotion on Subordinate Performance (Janet McColl-Kennedy and Ronald Anderson, The Leadership Quarterly, 2002).
[3] The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them (Richard Davidson and Sharon Begley, 2012)
[5] Rev. William Swing on Failure and Daydreams
[7] For more on the shortcomings of interviews--and how to address them: Daniel Kahneman on Conducting Better Interviews
[8] What Is Mindset (Carol Dweck, 2012). Note that subsequent research has cast doubt on some of Dweck's findings. I believe the concept of mindset is still useful, but we should avoid overstating its impact. For more, see Minding Our Mindset.
[9] Mind Your Errors: Evidence for a Neural Mechanism Linking Growth Mind-Set to Adaptive Posterior Adjustments (Jason Moser et al, Psychological Science, 2011)
[10] Corn Mazes and Mental Models
[11] What is brain plasticity, and why is it so important? (Duncan Banks, The Conversation, 2016)
[12] For more on debriefing (aka "reviewing"):
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Your Guide to Active Reviewing (Roger Greenaway)
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Don't be put off by the somewhat baffling design of this website--it's a treasure trove of resources, such as Reviewing for Results and Reviewing by Doing.
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- Successful Debriefing: Ask, Don't Tell
[13] Why You Can't Stop Thinking About Something
[16] The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life's Hurdles, Chapter 2: How Resilient Are You?, pages 31-47 (Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatté, 2002)
[17] The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick), page 63 (Seth Godin, 2007)
Photo by Kevin.