Question of the Day: Do people actually learn from failure?

As we push the limits of mind and body, any of us … entrepreneurs, athletes, students, or people striving toward any goal at all … face a high probability of encountering failure. Business ventures can collapse, runners sometimes have to drop out of races, and rejection letters arrive in the mail. Conventional wisdom says that a dose of failure can be instructive. But as Lane Wallace wrote in a previous post, that may not actually be the case.

If that’s true … if we don’t learn as much from failure as we could, or perhaps should … why is that? Here are a few interesting perspectives on the question, worth checking out.

It seems people may tend to attribute success to their own skill, but attribute failure to forces outside of their control. In this article on Slate.com, journalist Daniel Gross looks at the peculiar way the world’s economic leaders have blamed the recent catastrophe on the system, instead of themselves.

Some people go one step further … setting themselves up to have that external excuse, as Benedict Carey explores in the New York Times.

Why do we go to such lengths to avoid facing our role in failure? Maybe because failure is so psychologically traumatic. And the grief, depression, and anger that often follow failure can impede the learning process. (A good argument for Silicon Valley’s insistence on not punishing entrepreneurial failure.) If you want some details on how entrepreneurs can react to a failure of their businesses (hint: not well), read this study from the Journal Management and Organization that tracked the impact of failure on five New Zealand entrepreneurs. Sobering, but a few positive kernels to be gleaned from it.

So do all of us just rationalize, run away, or otherwise avoid facing failure? No. Some athletes, in fact, seek it out … in grueling, almost-impossible challenges. Are they crazy? Decide for yourself after reading Graham Averill’s take on why he would take on a bike race only six people in history have finished. Particularly interesting is the fact that Averill says not all athletes learn from failure. But the best athletes … Olympic-level athletes … don’t get there without mastering the art.

And for all the people who are busy avoiding failure … there are at least a few writers that are providing balance, focusing entirely on the subject! The online magazine Failure (kind of fun, in and of itself, that there’s a site dedicated just to failure!) has an interesting interview with Paul B. Carroll, one of the authors of Billion Dollar Lessons, about some of the most spectacular, and avoidable, business failures of the past 25 years. So even if the CEOs themselves weren’t learning from their failures, at least the rest of us can!