Productive failure

We are not as open minded as we would love to think. Sometimes only a resounding failure can trigger a learning experience. This and this articles inspired me to write the post.

Learning is not always good. If we would learn and relearn everything, question any piece of knowledge we have, we would not be able to live a regular life. Therefore, once we decide to believe in something it is very difficult to make us change our mind. Indeed, what could cause one to change his mind?

1. Challanging our beliefs does not help. Suppose someone challanges our beliefs presenting an opposite point of view which is equally reasonable. What happens then? Do we accept possiblily of a different answer and a good chance that we are wrong? Maybe we could publically doubt our position, but our resolve would get stronger. We would look for ideas, clues and proofs to show that we were right all along. And any such proof, even a phantom one, would make us more sure of our truth. We have thousads of years of religious warfare to proof this.
2. We cannot be objective. Another common attack on someone’s beliefs is questioning his objectivity. After all, if you have an interest in something, you will try to make this happen. While objectivity claim works for other people’s beliefs, or own belief system is extremely stubborn. We will try to tell that we are objective, and we will do nothing to change our beliefs. We do benefit from them, so why change anything?
3. We are not really ready to listen. The search for anything that affirms our views is so strong that we are not really ready to listen to opposing arguments. If anything, we can quitely tolerate the opposing views, looking for holes in argumentation we can use for our advantage. We even unconciously seek company of people who have similar views, so we do not need to face opposition.
4. Something we are used to feels better. This fallacy is known as “appeal to tradition”. By using something to our benefit for a long time, we do not want to challange or change it. It is easier simply to let it be.

If that is not enough here you will find additional fallacies that will make you stubborn, including our need to win, paranoia, lack of understanding in statistics, and double standards. Facts do not readily change our minds. Experiences do.

We do know that people change their minds. How could it be? Something really huge is required for us to change our mind, something like massive failure. We all fail. Successful people fail more often and less devastatingly. Very successful people learn from failures and fail differently each time. Failure triggers the learning mechanisms in several ways.

1. We feel bad about it. After all, if it would feel good we would seek it rather than try to prevent it. When we fail we should feel bad. The smart thing to do is recognize the feeling and use it to energize learning from the experience. It will hurt for a short while, but once we get successful we will feel good with ourselves again.
2. We become restless. Usually we do not want to change. Failure is the driving force of change. When we fail we become restless, and we are ready to make changes. We are even actively looking for something to change.
3. We become creative. When faced with failure and imminent change, we quite often become more productive or more creative. The hormonal changes generated by the failure insure our adaptation. We search for new ways to use the change to our advantage.
4. We adapt. Once we find a way to feel good we a change caused by failure, we feel good with ourselves again. We adapt whatever views and skills that should prevent the next failure.
5. We become more resilient. With each failure we become more resilient, we know to learn from it better and to suffer from it less. We know that after the failure we will adapt and possibly grow, so we might as well accept growth mindset and even welcome learning experiences.

This is definitely easier said than done. Failure is a massive driver of change. We are programmed to adapt. Change and growth are just a part of the adaptation mechanism.