THE SUCCESSFUL ATTITUDE
opposites. The more we learn about human
striving, the more we see that success and
failure are inextricably bound together.scienTisTs are well accustomed to the
idea that progress could not exist without
failure. The scientific method itself rests
on repeated trial and error. An experiment
that fails to prove a researcher’s hypoth-
esis isn’t a failure, per se; it’s simply more
data to support further inquiries. Pioneer-
ing physicist Enrico Fermi, who created the
world’s first nuclear reactor, is said to have
told his students that there are two possible
outcomes for an experiment. “If the result
confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made
a measurement,” Fermi said. “If the result
is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve
made a discovery.”
In his book Failure: Why Science Is So
Successful, biologist Stuart Firestein ar-
gues that if scientists don’t encounter
constant failure, they’re doing something
wrong. “One must try to fail because it is
the only strategy to avoid repeating the ob-
vious,” he writes. “Too often you fail until
you succeed, and then you are expected to
stop failing.” For scientists, “failure is not a
temporary condition,” he notes. It is a con-
stant and essential companion.
Simply acknowledging the ubiquity of
failure appears to set students up for future
success. In a 2016 study, researchers at the
Teachers College of Columbia University
asked three groups of high school students
to read biographies of three famous sci-
entists: Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and
Michael Faraday. One group read biogra-
phies that focused only on the scientists’
accomplishments. The other two groups
read biographies that focused on their per-
sonal and professional struggles, including
foiled ambitions and failed experiments.
The students who read about the scien-
tists’ struggles went on to perform better
in math and science classes.
“The message that even successful sci-
entists experience failures prior to their
achievements may help students interpret
their difficulties in science classes as nor-
mal occurrences rather than a reflection oftheir lack of intelligence or talent for sci-
ence,” the researchers wrote in their paper
“Even Einstein Struggled,” published in
the Journal of Education Psychology.
One of the study’s authors, cognitive-
studies professor Xiaodong Lin-Siegler,
went on to be the founding director of Co-
lumbia’s Education for Persistence and In-
novation Center, dedicated to the study of
failure. Lin-Siegler herself has talked about
her rocky road to academic success. She
was rejected by three graduate schools, in-
cluding the Columbia Teachers College, in-
spiring her research. One of the center’s
first major research projects will be to in-
terview Nobel laureates about their expe-
riences with failure. “Few studies exist on
how failure can lead to success and how to
educate our youth about this process,” the
center says of the research. “The goal is to
help students recognize that failure is es-
sential to future success.”There is a larger movement afoot to
break down the taboos around failure. In
the summer of 2010, neuroscientist Mela-
nie Stefan found her application for a fel-
lowship yet again rejected. That wasn’t sur-
prising in itself. She estimated that most
of the fellowships for which she was ap-
plying had about a 15% acceptance rate.
Nevertheless, it stung. Stefan found darkly
humorous consolation in the fact that, the
same day her rejection came through, Bra-
zil’s World Cup team cut soccer phenom-
enon Ronaldinho. But as she thought more
about it, Stefan realized that while Ronald-
inho’s failures are visible for all the world
to see, most people’s aren’t.
“My CV does not reflect the bulk of
my academic efforts—it does not men-
tion the exams I failed, my unsuccessful
Ph.D. or fellowship applications, or the pa-
pers never accepted for publication,” Ste-
fan wrote in the journal Nature. “At con-
ferences, I talk about the one project that
worked, not about the many that failed.”
Stefan, now a lecturer at the University
of Edinburgh, called on her academic col-
leagues to create a CV of their failures, in-
cluding “every unsuccessful application,Research
shows
that when
students
accept that
failures are
inevitable,
it sets
them up
for future
success.