Failure spelling future success is an exception, not the rule

livemint.com:

A new scientific paper on failure may have succeeded in offering the most depressing opening line in the history of scientific papers: “Is there anything failure does not ruin? It destroys reputations, careers, and families; economic prospects, political prospects, and social ones." That’s perhaps a useful corrective to all the graduation speakers, motivational gurus, and TED-talk-giving experts who glibly recount how they persisted, failure after failure, on the way to success. It’s easy to forget that many more people fail at least as many times and never achieve their goal. There are many more frustrated authors than best-selling ones, failed entrepreneurs than self-made billionaires, and actor-baristas than bona fide movie stars.

But it may not be quite as depressing as the new paper suggests. There are some sub-categories of failure that do seem to spawn success, and there are ways of responding to failure that can improve your prospects. The important finding in the paper, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, is that people tend to overestimate how easy it is for others to overcome failures—like failing a test or overcoming addiction.

“Our goal was to better understand resilience and what gets into people’s way," said lead author Lauren Eskreis-Winkler of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Her results indicate that we overestimate how much people learn from failure. One experiment used a language-learning game in which people got feedback when they chose the wrong answer.

Those who paid attention to feedback improved. But fewer than participants expected. Resilient people are those who are willing to look failure in the eye, she said.