You’ve heard the axioms: success is built on failure; failure is a hallmark of innovation; The only absolute failure is giving up. Objectively successful people have long offered advice for dealing with defeat: from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who said, “it’s okay to celebrate success, but it’s more important to heed the lessons of failure,” to entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who wrote: “No one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you. All you have to do is learn from them…” However, new research suggests that the perceived benefits of failure are overrated .
Linking failure with success may not only be inaccurate but also harmful to society, according to an article published last week in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Researchers from Northwestern, Cornell, Yale and Columbia universities conducted 11 studies with more than 1,800 participants and found that people overestimate the rates at which failure leads to success. Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, PhD, assistant professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, led the team.
“We’re just trying to understand what’s stopping people from achieving true resilience,” he says. Fortune. “Business leaders like to talk about failure as fuel. While (this view) might lead you to be a little less afraid of failure, when failure occurs it makes you less likely to take active steps that build real resilience.”
Failure comes in countless forms, but here Eskreis-Winkler and his colleagues defined it as any event that did not achieve the desired goal. They considered success to be a corrective action that achieved or made progress toward the previously failed goal.
In one part of the study, participants were asked to predict the probability that a nurse, lawyer, or teacher would pass a licensing exam after failing it. People overestimated the success rates in each profession. For example, they predicted a 58% success rate for lawyers retaking the bar exam, while the real-world rate was 35%. Similarly, participants overestimated the percentage of students who re-took and passed the General Education Diploma test.
“You could see this whole phenomenon as a tendency toward optimism,” Eskreis-Winkler says, “a tendency to be overly optimistic about many things in life, including, in this particular case, the likelihood that we will recover from failure.”
Failures in business and health
The benefits of failure are not so much overrated as misunderstood, according to Rick Hunt, PhD, director of doctoral studies in management at Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business.
“No matter what your position is on the benefits of failure, you’re probably wrong,” Hunt says. Fortune via email. “Nowhere have the benefits of failure been more enthusiastically embraced than in the study and practice of entrepreneurship. “Failure is an inevitable facet of the entrepreneurial journey (and is much more common than business success), so academics have worked hard to understand the causes and consequences of failure.”
The belief that failure is fundamental to business growth has been exaggerated to the point of romanticism, Hunt says, noting that many of the famous entrepreneurs who wear failure like a badge of honor didn’t have to risk the roof over their heads to launch a business. On the other hand, failure has been destigmatized.
“Neither the appraisal nor the defamation of failure is accurate or useful, in business or in any other human endeavor. The question is where the pain of failure lies versus the benefits of failure,” Hunt says. “In business, the suffering usually falls on individuals, while the benefits are captured by society in general. That is, individuals generate valuable lessons from their failures, but they rarely share the benefits of those lessons.”
Eskreis-Winkler’s research found that overestimating the benefits of failure could also have devastating health consequences.
One segment of the study asked participants to measure the likelihood that someone with an ongoing opioid use disorder would enter a treatment program after experiencing an overdose. They predicted 51%, compared to the actual rate of 17%. Another group was given the same task, but was not informed of the overdose “failure.” They estimated 33% more accurately, leading the researchers to conclude that the mention of failure rather than optimism bias is what causes people to overestimate success.
When participants were asked to guess what percentage of heart attack patients implement healthy lifestyle changes, they overestimated once again: 62% compared to 47% in the real world. This results in participants incorrectly believing that 32,000 U.S. heart attack survivors would improve their health, the researchers noted.
“I think everyone wants to be resilient,” Eskreis-Winkler says. Fortune. “This common message of ‘failure is fuel; “It’s a springboard to success” has very good intentions. The goal really is to foster resilience.”
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Recover: inspiration does not equal motivation
Research found that part of the reason people tend to overestimate the resilience of others is because they also exaggerate the attention others pay to their mistakes.
“What really hinders resilience is that when people fail, they disengage, they stop paying attention and they disengage,” Eskreis-Winkler says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re disengaging because you’re afraid of failure, or if you’re disengaging because you’re too optimistic about failure. “Really, what is needed is a clear view of the real probability of what will happen after failure.”
Tempering your expectations involves understanding the difference between inspiration and motivation, he says. With graduation season in full swing, for example, you may have recently been inspired by a graduation speech. But when the ceremony was over, did the lingering feelings of inspiration really motivate you to take positive action?
The latest leg of Eskreis-Winkler’s research sheds light on the political implications of correcting misperceptions about failure. Participants informed about recidivism statistics were more likely to support taxpayer funding for the rehabilitation of formerly incarcerated individuals.
“You just tell people the actual rate at which you recover from failure. The moment this overly optimistic view is corrected, it is as if people receive an alarming wake-up call,” she says. “You realize it’s not that likely to happen on its own.”
As painful as it may be to swallow a pill, entrepreneurs in particular should let it punish them, Hunt says.
“The ‘Phoenix Effect’ is a good idea, and it’s a quintessentially American, Algiers-style notion, but it rarely comes to fruition,” Hunt says. “People have resources for one, and maybe two, opportunities to do something well, but then they become part of the fertile soil for future efforts by others.”
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