When Failure Serves No Good Purpose

When Is it okay to just give up and move on? And how can you find that sweet spot where failure is no longer insurmountable?

Image: Pexels/Liza Summer

I was terrible at baseball. I dreaded it, knew I would strike out, and kept circling to the back of the line-up in gym class. Did my prediction of striking out stem from a negative mindset or low self-esteem? Not really. In hindsight, I just stunk at baseball. Perhaps I could have improved with hours of batting practice. But realistically, I lacked the talent. Failure was largely inevitable.

Sometimes we’re not cut out for certain activities, no matter how hard we try.

Failure, though, has been touted as an essential stepping stone to success. If we don’t fail, then how can we learn to improve? Adversity and challenging experiences are often characterized as the secret sauce for building resilience and fortitude. When we fail, we are admonished to dust ourselves off and get back in the proverbial saddle, despite our anguish or embarrassment or even the certainty that we’ll fall off that horse again and again.

As we enter the New Year, replete with calls for New Year’s resolutions, it is time to consider whether positive assumptions about failure are overblown.

How did failure get such a positive reputation?

According to The Gift of Failure author, Jessica Lahey, failure is an essential motivator and a necessary learning tool. When we learn from our mistakes, we improve. Makes sense, on the surface. Failure can indeed be motivating; under certain conditions, we can push aside our losses, recalibrate, and emerge with renewed energy and a drive to succeed. We all fail at some point, and eliminating the stigma and shame associated with failure is critical.

Failure is considered essential for developing resilience, often defined as the ability to bounce back after adversity.

“It’s only when you’re faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges,” writes author Maria Konnikova. In her overview of the research, she points out that “resilient children had what psychologists call an ‘internal locus of control’: They believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the orchestrators of their own fates.”

Konnikova also reminds us that how we view adversity affects our attitude and capacity for resilience.

“Frame adversity as a challenge, and you become more flexible and able to deal with it, move on, learn from it, and grow,” she writes. “Frame it as a threat, and a potentially traumatic event becomes an enduring problem; you become more inflexible and more likely to be negatively affected.” Attitude is key.

But what about the downside to failure?

If failure is so beneficial, then why do we hate it so much? And are there times when failure is just, well, pointless and demoralizing?

Failure happens to us all. We burn the waffles, forget a friend’s birthday, or screw up at work. And sometimes, we really fall flat; our actions (or inactions) have serious consequences, leaving us regretful and distraught. As researcher Brene Brown puts it, the recent cultural and media focus on grit (the power to push yourself to achieve) and the “redemptive power” of failure overlook “the large swaths of darkness and struggle preceding it.”

We feel lousy when we fail — and it is human nature to steer clear of potentially painful situations. And if we view our failings as shameful, a character flaw, a sign of our incompetence, or a signal that nothing will improve, we remain stuck, wounded, and may agonize about our imperfections.

“Human beings are capable of worry and rumination,” Konnikova explains. “We can take a minor thing, blow it up in our heads, run through it over and over, and drive ourselves crazy until we feel like that minor thing is the biggest thing that ever happened.”

So, how and when can we draw strength from failure?

Many of life’s failure experiences cannot be avoided or controlled. However, some learning situations can be altered so that failure serves as a springboard to growth. In fact, it seems that there is a sweet spot where a certain dose of failure can truly motivate us rather than feel like a kick to the gut.

Recent studies have found an optimal degree of challenge or difficulty that can help us to stay focused, overcome setbacks, and remain motivated.

In fact, many times, we purposely seek out challenges. According to University of Arizona cognitive scientist, Robert Wilson, PhD and his colleagues, most studies show that participants select a task at an intermediate level of difficulty — not too easy and not too hard. Based on their additional research, they identified the sweet spot of learning and proposed an “85% rule” associated with a task’s level of difficulty.

Wilson found that achievement at a level of roughly 85% (essentially a B+ on a task or in real life) contributes to “maximizing your rate of learning” over time. “When we learn something new, like a language or musical instrument, we often seek challenges at the edge of our competence — not so hard that we are discouraged, but not so easy that we get bored.”

Wilson’s research validates what already makes intuitive sense; we learn best when challenged, but not when the demands are too great.

An optimal level of difficulty invigorates us and sparks further motivation — even when faced with occasional setbacks. This allows us to lick our wounds, but muster the drive to persist. Teachers, coaches, and mentors would be wise to consider these findings when designing ideal learning environments.

How to make failure work for you

• Think back to a difficult task where you felt motivated and driven. What helped you stay focused and push yourself further? Was it the thrill of mastering a new skill, immersion in a creative project, reaching an important goal, or the kind, but persistent encouragement from a teacher or mentor? Perhaps you discovered that “sweet spot” of learning where you felt competent and excited to challenge yourself more, but were unencumbered by fears. Understanding what supports or derails your efforts — and when to cut your losses — can guide you when facing your next challenge.

• Failure also may serve as a wake-up call and embolden us to shift gears and find a different path. We might be in the wrong college major or job or unsalvageable relationship. And there are times when we might not care whether our skills improve; I certainly didn’t care in that grade school gym class. Success at baseball was never in the cards. It just didn’t matter.

• Failing can chip away at our self-esteem; at other times, though it can make us angry. Some situations or outcomes are just unfair. Harnessing our anger can energize us to advocate for change or fight injustice. Our distress can be transformed into a drive to create much-needed change.

• As much as we hate to fail, we learn that we can survive and endure once we recover from the initial assault to our self-esteem. It stings when, Wham!, we are reminded of our vulnerability and imperfections. But if we can compassionately forgive our failings and accept our limited ability to control events, we eventually grow from the experience.

It makes sense that how we view failure — and whether we attribute it to bad luck, a lack of skills, or personal inadequacy — affects our motivation to try again.

My baseball fiasco was a temporary inconvenience; although I felt miserable at the time, I had no athletic aspirations, so my overall sense of self-worth was not marred. Sometimes, though, failure can be demoralizing and it undermines our self-esteem. Yet, when viewed as an opportunity for self-awareness and personal growth, even those difficult experiences provide valuable life lessons that can guide our decisions.

Wishing you a wonderful New Year!

Please share with others, hit the “like” button, and let me know your thoughts, opinions, or ideas in the comments section below!

How have you approached or learned from failure and when was it was time to abandon an insurmountable task?

A similar version of this article was posted on Medium in August, 2023.