Failure Is A Lousy Teacher

02/06/2023, 09:19 Failure is a Lousy Teacher - Scott H Young
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Failure is a Lousy Teacher

 September, 2022 | Comments | Share
It’s a common opinion that we learn more from failure than success.
“The wisdom of learning from failure is incontrovertible,” says Harvard Bu

Review. Learning from failure “fosters creativity” and helps you “become m
resilient,” according to another essay. When Thomas Edison was asked if h
disappointed with his lack of results in finding a workable lightbulb filame
replied, “I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that
work.”
Here, though, the feel-good opinion is wrong.
We generally don’t learn more from failure than success. In cases where the
value in mistakes, failure is followed quickly by success, rather than prolon
struggle. The reason is simple math.
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2022/09/06/failure-lousy-teacher/ 1/20
Success, Failure and Information Theory

Listen to this article
ScottHYoung – (Ep 226) - Failure is a lousy teacher
That we generally learn more from success than failure is evident from the
principles of information theory.
Information theory was developed in the 1940s by mathematician Claude

Shannon. The basic idea is that information is the reduction of uncertainty.
Consider flipping a coin. Before I flip, there is an equal chance the outcome
heads or tails. After the flip, I know only one of those results occurred—thi
halving of uncertainty results in one bit of information I didn’t have before
The information gained from flipping a coin is symmetrical. Heads and tai
equally likely, so I learn the same amount from experiencing either event.
This doesn’t hold if one outcome is far more likely than another. If I try to o
40-number combination lock with a random, 3-digit code, my chance of op
is only one in 64,000. Failure here only reduces the space of possibilities by
hardly any information at all. In contrast, if I had opened the lock successfu
would have eliminated any remaining uncertainty.
In the combination-lock example, success teaches you far, far more than fai
Running a business is like finding a combination that opens a lock. You nee
right mixture of product, team, marketing, and customer needs to have a
successful outcome. Failure is more likely than success—most products an
businesses underperform or fail outright. Thus, you gain exponentially mo
information about what works when you find a hit than you do with a mis
In contrast, failure can be highly instructive in some domains. Plane crashe

happen rarely, so when one does occur, much potential information can be
gleaned about the source of the disaster. Our knowledge of piloting is so
advanced that successful takeoffs and landings don’t reduce uncertainty by
at all.
Of course, this doesn’t mean a pilot learns to fly by crashing a lot. When yo
flying a plane, most settings of the controls would result in a crash if unfixe
simply that, society as a whole benefits from thorough investigation of plan

crashes because trained pilots rarely have such severe mistakes.
Most domains of learning are like the novice pilot, entrepreneur or combin
lock. There are far fewer conditions that enable success than those that allo
failure. Thus, learning what works imparts far more information than learn
what doesn’t work.
Despite Edison’s optimism, his learning process would have ended immed
had he started with tungsten instead of trying out thousands of materials t
ultimately didn’t work.
Studies on productive failure and learning from errors find benefits to mak
mistakes in learning—if those mistakes are promptly corrected. When a su
example or corrective feedback immediately follows every failure, the info
difference between success and failure is eliminated.
Outside a classroom, failure is seldom followed by a lesson telling you exa

how you should have done it.
What About Emotions? Failure Discourages Effort

Perhaps I’m being too coolly rational in my analysis here. Don’t emotions f
into learning as well? Isn’t failure a great teacher emotionally, even if it doe
provide informative lessons?
Here too, the boon of learning from failure is overstated.
Failure is discouraging. Experiencing consistent failure lowers motivation.

extreme cases, it can lead to learned helplessness, and you stop trying even
success is plausible.
Success, in contrast, is motivating. It builds self-efficacy and confidence, wh

related to greater motivation in learning. If you experience success in early
mathematics, it boosts your confidence when attempting higher mathemat
you’re more likely to persist when you experience setbacks.
What about grit and perseverance? They matter, but it’s important not to c
the right way to process failures (persistence) with the idea that failure itse
makes us better.
Grit comes from the belief that, despite current failures, success will be
forthcoming. Where does such a belief come from? I’d argue that it comes f
background of confidence, either from your own past successes or from
witnessing or learning from others’ successes.
The idea that failure is inherently character-building seems dubious to me.

Repeated failure requires—but it doesn’t build—grit. It’s experiencing succ
after persisting through failure that reinforces perseverance.
Only taking on easy problems doesn’t impart grit. But neither does consist
failure on hard problems. It’s taking on challenging problems AND succee
them that matters.
Overlearning from Failures

Maybe you think I’ve missed the point.
The point isn’t that failure is inherently valuable—either emotionally or

informationally—but that we can’t always control when we experience fail
Thus we should adopt a positive attitude towards it.
In this case, I agree. Failure and mistakes are often unavoidable. To the exte
we can have a healthy attitude, I think leaning toward perseverance is gen
wise. (Although persisting in doomed projects is an underappreciated prob
However, there’s another danger of advice like this—we can easily overlea
failures.
Many failures are like our combination-lock example: the specific thing we
didn’t work. It would be disastrous to infer, after guessing 20-12-32, that th
actual code couldn’t contain any of those numbers, any even numbers, or a
middle-low-high sequence. Those “lessons” are overeager attempts to gain
information from the failure than is actually there.
Similarly, we can easily over-infer from our circumstances when we experi

business failure, a lousy relationship or a bad job. The actual reasons for ou
failure may be specific. Yet we extrapolate those to anything that resembles
original condition. A partner that cheated on you, for instance, might conv
you that all partners are potentially unfaithful.
In many cases, the healthy attitude to failure is to move on. Keep a mental
any patterns surrounding your failed exercise, but don’t expect definitive l
about what works to emerge when success is relatively infrequent.
Planning for Success

Overall, we learn more from success than failure. Success is both more
informative and motivating. When struggle is helpful, it tends to be follow
success.
Of course, success isn’t something we can guarantee. Our ignorance about

makes something successful is what makes success informative in the first
Even so, we can take steps to build toward success:
Build successes in small increments. If you’ve never succeeded at a ye

project, try a month-long project. If your month-long efforts have fizzled
weekend. If you’ve never written a book, start with an essay. If you hav
launched a company, try finding a single client.
Pick challenges where success is likely, but not certain. The 85% rule f
learning suggests we aim for roughly five successes (and one failure) ou
every six attempts. The exact percentage is less critical than the suggesti
succeeding most of the time is our aim. If we’re failing much more than
our expectations are out of whack, our projects are too difficult, or we h
gotten the training to do what we’re attempting.
Learn the hard lessons from others first. When failure is likely, begin by
learning as much as you can about what works by studying others’ succ
The more you understand what the “success pattern” looks like for a pa
endeavor, the less you’ll need to learn through trial and error.
When you do fail, keep moving. Catastrophic, unexpected failures do o
lessons for introspection. But run-of-the-mill failures often don’t.
Overinterpretting the lessons of failure can be just as bad as, or worse th
learning anything from it. When failure is the status-quo, the best thing
in the face of failure is to keep trying.
Experiencing failure can build some valuable character traits: compassion,

humility and gratitude. In this sense, failures are not wasted experiences. A
when we do encounter them, it’s probably best to see them in a positive lig
But, we should avoid exaggerating this silver lining into believing that the
path to success is a string of failures, especially when we can choose an alte
route.
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EG Ewa Gros
9 months ago
Hi Scott, I must admit that it's a first time that I don't quite agree with what you have written... Even
think that failure is a good thing itself (it's disappointing, hard to overcome, sometimes humiliating)
that we often ask ourselves more questions when things do not go as we would like. If we succeed, we
happy moving on, without even thinking how to reproduce our success. Sometimes it works, other ti
When my daughter was in her primary school, she got a B+ at a “using a dictionary” control test. For
student, it was a bit disappointing, but not really a big concern. She showed me her copy, and it was
with wrong answers, so I asked her a few questions about it. She didn't get it at all, she wasn't able to
word in a dictionary, she didn't know how it works, and I still wonder how her teacher could give her
sometimes a success may be due to a simple chance (or a bad teacher here), while failing may take m
but may correct the basics of your future successes... Because sometimes success may be based on an
just the circumstances turned into a win, with no chances of repetition. But after all this said, I must
the success gives us surely a better motivation to continue, while failure demands a lot of grit and pe
to keep trying. Anyway, thanks for this article :)
0 0 Reply • Share ›
Scott Young Mod > Ewa Gros

9 months ago
I think we ask more questions when we have failure because we need to do more interpretiv
That's not always a good thing.
For instance, if I write a book and it sells really well, I don't know exactly what worked. But
that a lot of the factors that went into the book are probably good, so I can emulate some of
successes. If I write a book and it fails (as most do), I don't really know anything. So I'm goi
do a lot of thinking to see if I can untangle some potential causes.
My point here is that when successes are rarer than failures (as is typically the case when le
something from scratch), we gain far more information from the things that work than thos
don't. The motivational effects are a bonus, but they also point in the same direction.
0 0 Reply •
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2022/09/06/failure-lousy-teacher/
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11/20
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EG Ewa Gros > Scott Young

9 months ago
I agree if we're talking about some specific tasks or projects that are independent
external factors : like the lock combination that you've mentioned. Or like the Rub
I tried to learn it by myself and I miserably failed after days of trials with only one
I learn from my random trying - that it wasn't a good method. So I followed the al
of people who made it successfully before me, and I succeeded as well. I know now
resolve the cube every time I want but I only learned what others taught me, I did
anything and quite often I'm wonder what was the learning process of the first per
found this method.
On the other hand, you have some projects that are not independent of external fa
writing a book. If we consider that a success means a good rank on Amazon's best
imagine writing a really good book that all your friends and editors are delighted w
the moment you submit it to Amazon, there's a major event that hits your country
whole world, like Covid-19 did, and your book remains underrated, not because it
because at this precise moment your potential readers have other things to do or t
about. You may learn from this to analyze the overall situation and choose better t
submission date (hypothetically of course, as some events are not foreseeable at a
surely not an expert in this field ;). But if everything goes well and you succeed str
you may not put enough attention to all these external factors, which may cause y
troubles with your next book...
My point is that success may be a complicated combination of different non-linea
and some dose of failure may help us to understand it better, and be able to repea
Scott Young Mod > Ewa Gros

9 months ago
In this case though you're assuming I can tell why the book was a flop. H
released books and courses for years now I can say with certainty you ne
information. (You also don't get the information when it's a hit either, bu
when it's a hit you know that at least *some* of the intentional settings w
for marketing/topic/fit, even if you benefited from luck too.)
The point of my essay isn't to say you can't learn anything from failure. S
the straight-line to success is usually more beneficial and that failures, w
helpful are usually either (a) quickly corrected or (b) variations from a n
optimal state.
V
VM
9 months ago
Thank you, Scott. This was a much needed take on this topic and I love what you have pointed out he
S
Sarthak Aggarwal
9 months ago
i successfully imagined a sales page for an enterprise app. i made it long.

i still remember the amount of effort of thinking and feeling what could work I applied without havin
knowledge of enterprise sales.
i did this before too, once. and now i do it very often.

failure teaches you what is not going to sell.
and bigger the failure. bigger does your mindset develop.

btw i was a Product Manager and for 1.5 years learned basics, i think i succeeded in learning things.
but today sometimes, I am still learning from that experience, on what was wrong compared to what
as success. that startup was bought.
Scott Young Mod > Sarthak Aggarwal

9 months ago
To be clear, I do think you can learn from failures. It's simply that failure often teaches less
success in the same task, for both informational and motivational reasons. Knowing what d
isn't as informative as knowing what does, because the latter is a more restrictive category.
Sometimes this knowledge doesn't matter--if you're only have a combination lock, you just
trying. But if you also have a manual teaching you the code, studying the manual first is pro
helpful. So is taking on challenges that you're more likely to succeed at, so you can solve sm
problems before dealing with big ones.
U
Uzair Islam
9 months ago
Also by the way, would it be possible for you to write an article on general problem-solving skills or h
:o I remember you once mentioned "hill climbing" in an answer, and I didn't know what that was. It'
see a list and short explanations of different methods :)
Scott Young Mod > Uzair Islam

9 months ago
Sure--but I don't like writing about these because (a) people do these instinctively and auto
so they're purely descriptive, not useful advice (b) most "skill" is domain-specific, so learnin
problem-solving skills doesn't actually help.
The main ones I've read are:
1. Generate-and-test, aka trial-and-error.

2. Means-ends analysis -- alternating between identifying gaps between your current and g
and searching for means to reduce those gaps. ("How do I get to the grocery store--the prob
of distance, I can use my car to reduce distances.")

3. Hill-climbing -- making the current solution better, iteratively. So you start with an essay
editing sentences that make it better as a whole until you can't edit any more sentences to m
better. That makes a locally good essay, but won't be guaranteed to make the best possible e
you might write your way into a dead-end)
4. Planning -- reformulate the problem in a simplified way, solve the problem in the simplif
and use that to control your actions in the real problem.
5. Analogy -- find an example and compare it to something from memory. Lots of research
-it's a powerful mechanism, but its difficult to find good analogies unless they're similar to
problem in question.
Again, the important point to stress is that we are hardwired to do all of these. They don't n
taught.
U
Uzair Islam
9 months ago edited
I was thinking a LOT about this the other day.
In software engineering jobs especially, it's very common to see trainers, mentors, seniors, and leads
new hires to jump into a codebase blind and just figure out assignments on their own. The rationale
the more someone has to work with an unstructured problem, the better they'll get at problem-solvin
According to some of the people I've asked, seniors are usually looking for people with a "proactive",
and "can-do" attitude, so that you can hand a junior developer any language, framework, or problem
they'll at least put together something that works-ish.
Is there anything to be gained by simply letting people work on a variety of unstructured problems?
people can at least learn to generalize patterns that allow them to reach correct answers faster? or pe
people can generate heuristics that at least help them turn intractable problems into tractable ones?
Things like pattern-matching, abstraction, decomposition, prioritization, backward-design, etc. -- all

may seem simple, but few people seem to apply these intentionally and repeatedly in their
line of work.
If people are handed frequent right answers and successes, is there a cost we are missing out? or if th
cost, can it be countered in some way?
I've also wondered about what consultants do. Essentially, Consultants from places like Mckinsey ar
to be valuable because of their "general problem-solving skills." Most of them have worked on a lot o
with little overlap between cases. And in fact, consultants claim they have the ability to work on a wid
of problems (costing, marketing, customer service, etc.) and industries (transport, energy, healthcare
etc.) all without specialized domain knowledge or experience.
Does that means the entire value of consultants is effectively built on a myth and mostly just brand im
Scott Young Mod > Uzair Islam

9 months ago
9 months ago
Lots to unpack here, but these are my high-level thoughts:
1. Some researchers disavow any benefit of this kind of "unstructured" learning (see Swelle
Kirschner, Clark 2006). I tend to be more moderate. I do think that struggling on a problem
benefits, because it helps you pay attention to the original problem state so you're better ab
remember the solution. Human attention is problem-oriented, so when we're told a solutio
attending to the problem state we may not remember it as well in such contexts in the futur
isn't the same as we learn better by struggling a lot, in general. It just means sometimes it h
a problem for a bit first and then see the answer. Even in those cases, the *sometimes* is an
qualifier. Making someone struggle for awhile before giving them the answer is also discou
2. Exploratory strategies for learning *can* be beneficial through greater variation. So, if yo
that X works, and only try X, you may not know the status of Y, Z or Q. But if you have to tr
and X in order to figure out that X and Z work, you've learned more. I think this is why som
more constructivist approach to learning can be beneficial--greater exploration of the probl
But it's really easy to turn into a combination lock situation where you simply experience re
failure without much improvement (or adopting lousy methods that sort-of work since you
the surefire ways that do.)
see more
U
Uzair Islam > Scott Young
9 months ago
Thank you so much for your response! I'm gonna save it for reference!
Super looking forward to the next book you're planning on writing :)
PC
Philip Corless > Scott Young
9 months ago
I think your blog is about criticising the idea that by failing fast you can learn to su
because you are not afraid of failure. This seems to me to be more about the inner
people have in their own minds when a fear of failure stops them from trying to su
I would argue that rather than arguing about whether success or failure are the be
it is more important to focus on getting the job done by trying to find out what wo
paying attention to the feedback you can get from other people or yourself or in th
you are involved in.
It is important to learn from your mistakes either as a form of adaption or in a dee
reflecting on what caused you to go wrong and what can you do to put it right. But
help to make a big thing out of success or failure but to get into a good frame of m
learn. As Russell Ackoff says there are mistakes of omission or commission and m
companies only admit what they do wrong but not what they didn’t do that they c
done and should have done differently. This requires more careful thought and ho
the case of an unsolvable code maybe a person shouldn’t be trying to solve it witho
developing the skills needed to solve it first.
Another way to learn is to notice that there is something people think is right but
Like making good cars that pollute the atmosphere. It’s better to make good electr
if you were the first person to try you would have made mistakes at first but learn
mistakes has value if you know you are doing the right thing.
A lot of people do things too quickly and don’t stop to think carefully about their p
and their way of working. As Tennyson says in his poem ‘ If ‘, success and failure a
imposters. The important thing is to learn and get better without getting distracte
other people think or you think in your internal dialogue about success and failure
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02/06/2023, 09:19 Failure is a Lousy Teacher - Scott H Young

“The wisdom of learning from failure is incontrovertible,” says Harvard Bu

Here, though, the feel-good opinion is wrong.

Success, Failure and Information Theory

Information theory was developed in the 1940s by mathematician Claude

In contrast, failure can be highly instructive in some domains. Plane crashe

simply that, society as a whole benefits from thorough investigation of plan

Outside a classroom, failure is seldom followed by a lesson telling you exa

What About Emotions? Failure Discourages Effort

Here too, the boon of learning from failure is overstated.

Failure is discouraging. Experiencing consistent failure lowers motivation.

Success, in contrast, is motivating. It builds self-efficacy and confidence, wh

The idea that failure is inherently character-building seems dubious to me.

Overlearning from Failures

The point isn’t that failure is inherently valuable—either emotionally or

Similarly, we can easily over-infer from our circumstances when we experi

Planning for Success

Of course, success isn’t something we can guarantee. Our ignorance about

Even so, we can take steps to build toward success:

Build successes in small increments. If you’ve never succeeded at a ye

Experiencing failure can build some valuable character traits: compassion,

Best Learning Best Habits Best Goal Setting

Why Do People (Usually) Learn Less as They Get Olde

Good Advice is “Obvious”

Why You Need a Learning System

 Facebook  Twitter  Email  Pri

G Join the discussion…

LOG IN WITH OR SIGN UP WITH DISQUS ?

 1 Share Best Newe

Scott Young Mod > Ewa Gros

EG Ewa Gros > Scott Young

Scott Young Mod > Ewa Gros

i successfully imagined a sales page for an enterprise app. i made it long.

i did this before too, once. and now i do it very often.

and bigger the failure. bigger does your mindset develop.

Scott Young Mod > Sarthak Aggarwal

Scott Young Mod > Uzair Islam

The main ones I've read are:

1. Generate-and-test, aka trial-and-error.

of distance, I can use my car to reduce distances.")

I was thinking a LOT about this the other day.

Things like pattern-matching, abstraction, decomposition, prioritization, backward-design, etc. -- all

Scott Young Mod > Uzair Islam

Lots to unpack here, but these are my high-level thoughts:

Super looking forward to the next book you're planning on writing :)

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