2-3-4 Friday 26 Jan
‘Seeking to spark the most potential within you per word of any online newsletter’
1 thought
Contrary to what we suspect, failure doesn’t teach you
anything.
Right, you didn’t read that wrong. Failure teaches nothing.
We all hear the cliche - failure is the mother of success.
Leslie Berlin, in his 2009 article for the New York Times, wrote,
“The data are absolutely clear,” says Paul A. Gompers, a professor of business administration at the school and one of the study’s authors.
“Does failure breed new knowledge or experience that can be leveraged into performance the second time around?” he
asks.
In some cases, yes, but over all, he says,
“We found there is no benefit in terms of performance.”
Learning from failure does.
This is an important lesson because when we fail, and talk to our friends about it, some well meaning friends
might say,
Oh just put it behind you and move on.
We might even have taken some of that advice ourselves. When we’ve not gotten a result we’ve wanted, we think,
Oh, hard luck. Let’s aim for the next one.
You will probably still have the same margins of success if you didn’t learn from it.
The simple advice is,
don’t just make mistakes.
Learn from it.
1 talk
What would have to be true for this problem not to exist in the first place?
Clear Thinking, by Shane Parrish
1 tip
Asking yourself two questions:
- What
worked?
- What didn’t work? What was the problem that caused it not to work?
Here, there’s a catch.
Often you would hear advice like, if something didn’t work, think of future solutions.
That’s easy. But it’s not the right approach. Because
you’ve not even defined what the problem was. If the problem was mostly an external, uncontrollable circumstance, your solution might not be applicable to future problems.
The problem is that we jump too fast into solution-finding, before defining the problem.
One question that might help,
What would have to be true for this problem not to exist in the first place?
Taken from: Clear Thinking, by Shane Parrish
That keeps you focused on the root cause, and on a problem that you actually can solve.
Don’t just waste your failure, find the problem
behind that failure.
John
Live Young, Live Well - Work Your Love