After failures.

 What is failure? We all experience it. But only some people know how to learn from it to be more successful in the future. This article explores the meaning of failure, the relationship between success and failure, and why one shouldn’t fear failing.

The experience after failures?

Failure is an opportunity to learn

When we confuse our personal sense of self-value with success, we are restricting our ability to learn because our ego becomes another factor in this equation. Our ego tells us we succeeded because we're so smart and so great, or that we failed because we are a loser and can't win at anything.

Not All Failures Are Created Equal

A sophisticated understanding of failure’s causes and contexts will help to avoid the blame game and institute an effective strategy for learning from failure. Although an infinite number of things can go wrong in organizations, mistakes fall into three broad categories: preventable, complexity-related, and intelligent.

Share your own failure story. 

People tend to hide their own failures, out of a sense of shame, but there are ways to turn failure into success by transforming it into a story of growth.

In a series of 2018 and 2019 studies with Angela Duckworth, Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach asked people to turn failures in different domains like work, fitness, or school into inspirational stories for others. This often fueled success down the line. 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.

Focus on the long-term goal. 

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. Holding a clear long-term goal in mind—such as becoming a doctor or learning to sail—can help us to tolerate short-term failure and override information-avoidance.

Practice mindfulness. 

“There is yet another reason failure often contains superior information: failure violates expectations,” Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach write. Because people almost never intend to fail, failure can be surprising, which has the happy effect of waking up our brains—and a brain that is awake learns more than a brain that’s sleepwalking. When you feel surprised by failure, take that as a signal to be mindful and to sit with it rather than ignoring it. Indeed, multiple studies suggest that practicing mindfulness—that is, cultivating nonjudgmental awareness of thoughts and experiences—can help you to grow from failure.

Reflect on the lessons you learned. 

Because failure requires more interpretation and thinking than success if we’re to learn from it, Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach suggest reducing mental loads as much as possible in its wake.