Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.
Between my university lectures and outside speeches about the science of happiness, I do a lot of public speaking, and am always looking for ways to do so with more clarity and fluency. To that end, I regularly give talks in two languages that are not my own—not random languages, of course, but rather those I learned as an adult: Spanish and Catalan.
Although I can carry on ordinary conversation in these languages (and even speak one of them regularly at home), I have a foreign accent and can’t express myself with anywhere near the nuance or scientific depth that I can in English. Obliging myself to deliver a formal lecture, therefore, is an uncomfortable experience. But every time I undertake a book tour in these languages, I get better at meeting the linguistic challenge. And I even find that this exercise improves my public speaking in English.
This is a specific example of what turns out to be a broader truth: Doing something you’re bad at can make you better at what you’re good at, as well as potentially making you good at something new. Understanding this dynamic can give you an edge in your own area of excellence, and enhance your life generally. To be great at what you do, take a chance on flunking something else.
Trying to do something but coming up short is not fun. Take up skiing as an adult, and you will almost certainly be frustrated as you fall down over and over. The reason we hate being bad at things and failing is because when goal-directed activity is inhibited or blocked (either by an outside force or our own lack of aptitude), that stimulates our dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which is part of the brain’s pain circuitry. This is the same region affected when we experience social rejection.
This kind of mental pain does, however, have an evolved benefit—creating the motivation to succeed, if not at the activity at hand then at some other one. In a recent study of baseball players, skilled pitchers—who are generally poor hitters—were given batting practice. The scholars found that their inferior performance in batting and their resulting frustration led them to be more driven to improve their pitching.
This motivation effect is also detectable in business activities. As a group of psychologists reported in 2018, when employees are frustrated by their relative incompetence at one task, they tend to be motivated to show more competence for something they’re already better at. Perhaps you can relate to this finding when, pushed to perform outside your comfort zone at work, you discovered that you had greater motivation in your regular job afterward.
The mental pain of failure per se can also stimulate you to become better at the activity in which you lack proficiency—if you can reframe the adverse experience as an indicator of personal growth. This is what researchers found in 2022 when they conducted a field experiment at an improvisation club. One group of amateur improvisers was instructed to actively seek the feeling of awkwardness. The scholars found that, compared with improvisers who were not given this instruction, the first group was more engaged in the exercise. Instead of seeing the discomfort as something to avoid, they saw it as central to the process and leaned into it.
Another helpful way to turn the discomfort of failure into a source of progress is what psychologists call “action rumination.” Ruminating on failure is widely recognized to be a destructive waste of time, because this type of reflection focuses on self-worth and what failure says about one as a person. Action rumination is different: It is task-focused and involves replaying the exact missteps that one made and how they could be rectified in the future. Scholars have shown that thinking through something you have done poorly in this deliberately corrective way can lead to learning and improvement as opposed to frustration and chagrin.
The research is clear that although we hate to fail, doing so can be beneficial for learning a new skill and mastering an old one. This has implications for how to improve ordinary life.
Take, for example, one of the most common sources of emotional pain: rejection in the search for a romantic relationship. Start by recognizing that no relationship is without the risk of failure, and resolve to take some chances. But remember, too, the consoling truth that if a rejection occurs, the distress will almost certainly come with the motivation to take comfort in other successful relationships, such as ones with family and friends, by being better yet at those.
Once you’re on the dating market, don’t try to avoid feeling nervous. On the contrary, like the improv participants, lean into your uneasiness as a core part of learning and improvement. This will put you more at ease as you stop fighting emotions such as fear and anxiety, and assign value to the discomfort itself. Then, after an unsuccessful date, put personal reproach aside and instead do your rumination by analyzing the encounter forensically, working out how each stage of the date might have gone better. This process will dramatically improve the experience, and raise the likelihood of success over time.
You can put failure—or subpar performance, at least—to good use in many other areas of life. If you’re a student, take a class far outside your area of skills and interests, knowing that the struggle to cope with a very novel challenge may improve studying what you do like. Revel in the difficulty of it and dissect the mistakes you make—and you will almost certainly find that you’re doing even better at your preferred subject.
Employers can apply these principles as well. I like the “75/25 rule,” according to which employees spend three-quarters of their time on their assigned task and one quarter helping others outside their area. The short-term cost of this is friction as people wrestle with novelty and difficulty—and bosses should take care not to make this worse by being punitive or overly critical. But I have seen the long-term benefit of better motivation in the core assignment, as well as a better flow of information and distribution of new skills across different activities within an enterprise.
The embrace-failure principle can even be applied to happiness itself. None of us wants to be unhappy. But inviting sources of unhappiness into life can be extremely beneficial. Resolve not to be afraid of fear, anger, or sadness. They are normal and natural parts of life, after all. Dealing with them openly, though uncomfortable, will improve your skills at doing so. And if you let them, they will help you savor the joys of life all the more.
For an upcoming speech, I found an old expression in Catalan to make the very point that risking failure leads to greater prospect of success: Qui no s’arrisca, no pisca. That can be translated as “He who doesn’t take a risk catches no fish,” but the equivalent English idiom might be: Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Still, the Catalan strikes me as more poetic. See? Something gained.
The post To Truly Succeed, Fail Better appeared first on The Atlantic.
