How to Learn From Your Failures
How to Learn From Your Failures
How to Learn From Your Failures
August 24, 2022
By Jeremy Adam Smith
Summary
When researchers Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach developed the "Facing Failure" game, they wanted to test how well people learn from failure.
In their paper, Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach propose removing the ego from failure as much as possible by looking at other people's failures first, before you take on a task yourself.
In one of their studies, half of participants got lessons from other people's negative results in the Facing Failure game before playing it themselves-and learned more from those failures than they did from their own.
High school students who shared failures with middle school students went on to get better grades than those who didn't reframe their failures; middle schoolers who gave advice to elementary school students later spent more time on homework.
How can adults apply these insights to real life? If you're a manager, for example, consider sharing your mistakes with employees in helping them improve their own performance-which will help them learn from failure.
Often, we need to ask ourselves: Will my failures lead to rewards down the line? That's why goals and commitments are important for overcoming the cognitive barriers to learning from failure.
Many people believe that they should be hard on themselves in the wake of failure; after all, how else would you grow? In fact, many recent studies suggest that you're more likely to grow if you speak kindly to yourself, as a loved one might speak to you, in the wake of failure.
Reference
Smith, J. A. (2022, August 24). How to learn from your failures. Greater Good. Retrieved September 16, 2022, from https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_learn_from_your_failures