Off Course-On Target

What if the Secret to Success is Failure?

A recent NYT article “What if the Secret to Success is Failure?” is long by today's snack food reading standards but served up a VERY full course meal of great food for thought and is well worth your time to read no matter if you are a student, parent, teacher and indeed aren't we all of these simultaneously. 

I'm a huge fan of failure and remain puzzled and curious as to why it has come to be such a negative thing in many societies and communities.  Something to be avoided at all cost.  Maybe it is because I fail so often, many times every day, always have and hope I always will, that I have come to love failure.  What I love most is learning and I figured out a long time ago that learning and failure are inexorably linked and almost synonymous.  No learning without failure and no failure without learning.  Every time something goes wrong or does not work out for me, my first instinct is to ask "What is this trying to teach me?" or "What can I learn from this?" and each time I find the answer my learning goes up significantly.  Part of the reason perhaps that I also go for experiential learning every chance I can.  What I’ve learned along the way is that failure IS the “secret” to success in learning, love and life.

I mention all this for some context as to why this article resonates so deeply with me, along with my years as a high school teacher, a parent and an insatiably curious learner.  Learning is hard and figuring out how to do it well, especially in the more formal setting of education and training is particularly so.  I think we all know this and yet most discussions and programs seem to assume the opposite and come up with overly simplistic explanations of the problem and matching shallow solutions. 

It is therefore refreshing to see this complex challenge being treated with such seriousness and vigor as outlined in this article.  You may disagree with the specifics or perhaps the whole approach the two schools in this article are taking and I hope you will indeed reflect upon your experiences to critically consider their approaches.  However I also think your experiences will have shown you that “character traits” are more than anything else, the underlying factors leading to true success; a happy, meaningful, productive life.

Think about it; whether you are considering a new job applicant, a student, your children, your partner or best of all, the person you see in the mirror, don’t you find that it is traits such as

“zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity”

that have most determined your success?  Isn’t it when you have failed to do as well as you know you could in these areas that you have learned the most and gone on to be that much stronger, smarter and successful?

Whatever your answers and thoughts are to these questions, please do give this a read and your careful consideration.  I know many of you who follow my writing and speaking are in the learning, education and training fields and will find this particularly relevant.  Moreover though I think there is much to be learned here for every one of us snowflakes as we too strive to succeed a bit better each day at living a happy, meaningful and productive life. 

I hope you will get as much out of reading this article as much as I did and will give it your thoughtful consideration, talk about this notion of “character based learning” with your friends, family and colleagues and continue the conversation with your own posts, articles, FB updates, Tweets and talks,

Technology Can and DOES Change our Relationships; for the BETTER!

I like the concluding recommendation in this article and this TED talk by Susan Turkle for learning to love yourself better by being comfortable with and appreciative of solitude.  However I think that Turkle's TED talk and her new book Alone Together,make a fatally flawed assumption that using things such as texting and social media are eliminating our alone time and that our virtual means of expressing our emotions are replacing the real ones and lessening our human connections.

I simply don’t buy into Turkle’s assumptions that we are letting technology "take us places we don't want to go." and her conclusion that"The little devices in our pockets are so psychologically powerful that they don't eve change what we do, they change who we are."

Sorry Susan, but in my experience and observations at least NO! this is NOT necessarily so and WE as fundamentally social animals decide how, when and where to use tools and technology .  While learning to choose the best tool for the job and how to use it well is a big challenge that takes time and lots of experiential learning to figure out, and this is an exponentially increasing learning curve in our world filled with such abundance of choice, most of us DO figure it out and are all the richer for it in terms of improved connections with the other special snowflakes we chose to include in our lives.   Some of us are slower to learn than others and we pay lots of “stupid tax” in the wonderful cycle of try/fail/learn/adjust/repeat, but this tax amounts to less than a rounding error in the overall net value we gain through such learning.

While I understand that there are some glaring examples of poor choices we make along this learning curve which gossip and the media focus on, based on my experiences and observations, these examples are by far the vocal minority and represent a small extreme end of the spectrum of human behavior.  Surely by now we understand that such examples and “failures” are necessary components of learning and improvement and we should see them as positive things we want more of not less in our quest to continuously enrich our lives with greater breadth and depth of connections with both ourselves, our friends and our families?!

History shows that we make this same mistake over and over again where the pundits proclaim the arrival of new tools, technology and media are going to eliminate those that came before.  TV was going to eliminate radio, flight was going to eliminate trains and automobiles, eLearning was going to eliminate teachers and so on.  While new innovations clearly have a significant influence on what came before, (when was the last time you sat around with friends or family listening to the radio??), the new hardly ever eliminate or replace the old.  Our world is much more one of a giant Boolean Add equation than one of subtraction or reduction.

The new and sometimes daunting challenge as we acquire more and more tools in our toolbox is to know how and when to use the right tool for the job.  When is a Tweet or a FB update the best choice?  When is an Email or a phone call better?  When best to wait for the chance to meet in person and what to do in the interim?  I concur and hope that we will always prefer in person human contact over more distanced and removed virtual forms, but surely we would also want to augment the limited opportunities we have to be with those we love and care about with every possible means to converse, share, love and learn with them.  And as our tools and technology continue up the exponential curves increasing capabilities and decreasing costs, not too how the tools become more and more transparent and the connection we have with others becomes the focus.  Does it matter HOW an emotional personal connection with another human happens or that these happen more often for all 7+ billion of us snowflakes?

Turkle posits that our increased use of digital technology to converse with each other is lessening our ability to self reflect.  Seriously?  For me at least it has produced the exact opposite effect and something I’ve blogged about several times on my Learnativity blog as I try to reconcile how I can have so many deeply rich experiences in my day to day live in such a very short time.  It is an effect I have called ELD or Exponential Learning Density which I believe is created by a cycle of living IN the abundance of moments life offers us every day, then reflecting upon these and then sharing our thoughts, questions, feelings and learnings with others.  My conclusion is that by repeating this cycle of Live-Reflect-Articulate I end up with this extreme “density” or rich learning experiences and a life that is filled with non stop adventures, interactions with others and Mother Nature and more love, life and learning every day.  As I reflect back on how filled with rich experiential learning my life is, I still can’t quite comprehend I’m only just starting my fifth year on this grand sailing life adventure!

As one who perhaps has more solitude than most as I wander, wonder and ponder the world one nautical smile at a time single handing my sailboat around the planet, I can offer at least one shining example where I use the entire plethora of means at my avail to express my thoughts, feelings and emotions with the many friends and family who I am blessed to be surrounded by.  When I’m with others I meet out here or on my trips back to see friends and family, I’m as good and frequent a hugger as you’ll ever meet, I’m as comfortable kissing men as women (on the cheek/forehead) who I love and care for when I’m given the gift of the opportunity to be with them in person.  If I shake your hand, clink glasses with you or talk to you, I will be looking deep into your eyes.  However to the best of my knowledge all these people in my life also feel my love and caring for them more often as I use a vast array of tools and technology.that augment my abilities to connect with them.  All of these additional means are “virtual” through the use of the increasing abundance of communication choices I have.  I care SO much less about the means through which I get to express and share with others as I do with ensuring that we have more and more opportunities to share our lives, learning and love with each other.  So let’s please keep our eyes on the prize and not mistake the means we use with the end results of deeper human connection, commitment and conversation and ensure that what we have the most abundance of is Life, Love and Learning!

Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up

Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up | Magazine

• By Jonah Lehrer      December 21, 2009  | 10:00 am  | Wired Jan 2010

Dunbar came away from his in vivo studies with an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) “The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen,” Dunbar says. “But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn’t make sense.” Perhaps they hoped to see a specific protein but it wasn’t there. Or maybe their DNA sample showed the presence of an aberrant gene. The details always changed, but the story remained the same: The scientists were looking for X, but they found Y.  via www.wired.com

Erik Duval and I have long shared a fascination and frustration with the notion of learning from failure and particularly the lack of learning from failure, even outright refusal to do so.  I was therefore delighted to find this story and IMHO the excellent observations made by Jonah Lehrer about the nature of failure in science.  And how can you not love an article and writer who includes a quote from both Richard Feynman and Bob Dylan?!

I think Lehrer's comments and observations apply to most of us and life in general and I've found myself thinking more and more about this since first reading this article last month.  

I need to get better at following through on posting things soooner than later and so this has sat as one of more than hundred (no I'm not kidding) open tabs in my browsers waiting for me to post.  Thankfully Dan Pink provided the kick I needed to get this one posted when he took note of this same article and was apparently similarly struck by it and his noting of this as one of his 3 Articles Worth Reading.  (thanks Dan!)

I strongly encourage you to read Lehrer's article as I think it truly thought and action provoking.  Read for example such notes as:

• Belief, in other words, is a kind of blindness.
• If humans — scientists included — are apt to cling to their beliefs, why is science so successful? How do our theories ever change? How do we learn to reinterpret a failure so we can see the answer?
•  “These weren’t sloppy people,” Dunbar says. “They were working in some of the finest labs in the world. But experiments rarely tell us what we think they’re going to tell us. That’s the dirty secret of science.”
• The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored.

And consider closely his suggestions on 

 

How to Learn 
From Failure

Too often, we assume that a failed experiment is a wasted effort. But not all anomalies are useless. Here’s how to make the most of them. —J.L.

1Check Your Assumptions

Ask yourself why this result feels like a failure. What theory does it contradict? Maybe the hypothesis failed, not the experiment.

2Seek Out the Ignorant

Talk to people who are unfamiliar with your experiment. Explaining your work in simple terms may help you see it in a new light.

3Encourage Diversity

If everyone working on a problem speaks the same language, then everyone has the same set of assumptions.

4Beware of Failure-Blindness

It’s normal to filter out information that contradicts our preconceptions. The only way to avoid that bias is to be aware of it.

 

These seem to match extremely well with my experiences and observations and include why the overly hyped attention on so called "social media" has some great promise by adding in this cast to making steps 2 and 3 above very easy and effective.

Hope you enjoy and get as much out of this as I continue to do.