Fail Better
Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
Winston Churchill
I had a growth mindset before I knew what a growth mindset was.
As a child, I enjoyed learning.
That was reinforced by my parents and some of my teachers.
But I also had a childish fantasy that I would fail less and less as I got older and smarter.
I learned that along with the other facts and concepts in school.
Failure was something to avoid.
My energy was diverted from the growth mindset to a focus on avoiding failure.
This was most pronounced in my non-academic activities, especially sports.
I learned too late that playing it safe was the riskiest strategy.
Of course, not all failures are equal.
If we fail trying to accomplish something difficult, the failure can become an important part of the learning process.
Sometimes we fail because we were irresponsible or negligent.
Even then, we can often recover from our mistakes, if we don’t give up.
To cultivate a growth mindset in children, we should reward effort over success.
This does not mean giving out participation trophies, though participation often requires significant effort and should be rewarded.
It means that effort and persistence predict future success more than current success does.
Sometimes we succeed without knowing why we succeeded.
Sometimes we succeed because we got lucky.
In these cases, success is difficult to replicate.
Failure, on the other hand, is more transparent.
We usually know what we did wrong and what we need to change.
With persistence supported by a growth mindset, success becomes essentially certain.
If we don’t give up, we have confidence that we will eventually figure it out.
We should not get embarrassed if we come up short.
We should be embarrassed if we make the same mistake over and over.
How can we increase our chances of success?
We can cultivate a growth mindset.
We can focus on the process rather than the outcome.
We can surround ourselves with coaches rather than critics.
Coaches challenge us and encourage us.
Critics drag us down.
We don’t need the critics.
But coaches are invaluable.
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