We recently went through a stack of “intend to read when we have time” magazines and found a fascinating article on failure in an issue of Ode entitled In Praise of Failure. Marisa Taylor, the author, retells JK Rowling’s commencement address to Harvard in which she described her earlier failures as the catalyst for her success in writing the Harry Potter books. At one time, JK Rowling was jobless, broke and “as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless.” JK Rowling told the class that “failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to be anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me…. The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive.”
According to Ode, Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, has found that the way people view their own intelligence has a profound effect on how they handle failure. She believes that some people have a “fixed” theory of intelligence; they believe that they have a finite talent for learning and handle failure by blaming themselves, or becoming discouraged or defensive. They tend to focus more on tasks they can already do well and have a fear of trying things that might involve making a mistake or making them look stupid. Other people have an “expandable” theory of intelligence; they believe they can increase their ability by putting in more effort and they tend to enjoy a challenge, even if they fail at first. In a study she conducted of 400 middle school students in New York City, students with fixed mindsets, when they encountered failure, tended to study less and consider cheating. Those with expandable mindsets studied harder and spent more time on learning the subject. Dweck further explored whether students with “fixed” theories of intelligence could become more adaptable and she found that, after working with students with fixed mindsets to teach them that the brain was a muscle that grows stronger the more it is used and that they could expand their thinking, the group showed a marked improvement in their scores.
The Ode article goes on to talk about failure in business and includes many intriguing quotes of very successful people about why failure can be essential to success. According to Henry Ford, who went bankrupt multiple times before making the Ford Motor Company a success, “failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” Or as Michael Raynor, author of The Strategy Paradox, in examining the Betamax and MiniDisc Player failures of Sony, says “the lesson is the opposite of success is not failure, but mediocrity. To achieve big successes, you need to take big risks; if you take little or no risks, mediocrity is guaranteed.” Or as (our personal favorite) Winston Churchill, who failed the sixth grade and was booted out of office after World War II, put it “success is the ability to go from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
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