Do You Really Have to Fail to Succeed?

What’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you? Meeting your spouse? Becoming a parent? Some breakthrough moment of career success? When journalist Megan McArdle conducted a web survey on the topic, most respondents offered some variation on the love/kids/job theme. But then she turned to Google and found some surprises. Getting divorced ranks high. So does being diagnosed with cancer. And being fired. Rounding out the search results: Going to prison. That list is evidence of society’s reverence for difficult experiences that, when viewed from the proper perspective, lead to revelatory transformation. Although few of us actively wish for trauma, we recognize that it can offer an opportunity to test our resilience and then celebrate our mettle. In a way, this is nothing new. Since the biblical story of Job, many literary works have examined human beings’ ability to endure repeated hardship. And for decades now, psychologists have been studying why some people bounce back from adversity more easily than others—and what they gain in the process. In the past few years, however, resilience has emerged as perhaps the foremost emotional virtue—a characteristic we seek in employees, nurture in children, and hope to build in ourselves. No surprise, then, that bookshelves are filling up with treatises on how to achieve it. McArdle presents her findings in The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success. In addition, we have Supersurvivors: The Surprising Link Between Suffering and Success, by psychology professor David B. Feldman and journalist Lee Daniel Kravetz. Supersurvivors relates the stories of people whose significant traumas—near-fatal cancer, limb amputation, severe brain injury, the loss of a child—become catalyzing events. “These people don’t just grow; they revolutionize their lives,” the authors write. “They transform and transcend their suffering even while enduring it.” These books follow the deeply reported best seller How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, in which Paul Tough surveys the academic research and takes readers inside innovative educational programs that prioritize the development of character traits instead of cognitive skills. This genre of nonfiction certainly enriches the literature about success. Tough’s book deserves its acclaim, and it may change the way parents think about their children’s emotional makeup and the qualities they hope to instill in them. If you read Feldman and Kravetz, you will come away inspired and more attuned to the factors that influence resilience—including religious faith, the ability to forgive, and awareness of mortality—although you won’t get a clear road map for rebounding from calamity. McArdle’s book is engaging and at times insightful. Yet I worry that the narrative of surmounting adversity is becoming too idealized. Triumph over disaster is rightly seen as a laudable part of a person’s experiences, but it’s now sometimes presented as a requirement. “Peek into the basement of any successful life and you’ll see that they, too, are founded on failure,” McArdle writes. That argument overreaches. In fact, I am more taken by her observation that many of the things we consider “failures” are really accidents (driven by random events) or simple mistakes, and often there’s no lesson to be learned or silver lining to be found. “Supersurvivors radically deviate from their previous life paths, often transforming the worst thing that’s happened to them into the best.” Indeed, the more I read about resilience, the more I’m seeing the early signs of a correction to the excessive hype surrounding this idea. In the entrepreneurship world, some people are decrying a “failure fetish,” arguing that one’s ability to “fail fast” and abandon one start-up for the next has become too much of a badge of honor. “Taking the stigma out of failure is very exciting,” says Marc Andreessen, a leading venture capitalist. “But we see founders who give up too quickly…. Maybe it’s time to add a bit more stigma.” In education, at least a few thinkers are starting to question whether resilience and persistence are really the most important qualities to instill in kids. In The Myth of the Spoiled Child, Alfie Kohn, a prominent writer and lecturer, argues that emphasizing diligence and self-control often undercuts creativity and self-awareness and promotes bland conformity. He sees a circularity in the logic of resilience research. For instance, a study of West Point cadets found that those who rated themselves high in grit were most likely to complete an arduous summer training course. “[This] seems to prove only that people who are persistent persist,” he writes. He has a point: So long as we define “success” as the pot of gold that’s the reward for hard work, isn’t it common sense that by plugging away, despite obstacles, you are most likely to obtain it? It’s impossible to argue against resilience as a virtue—who wouldn’t want some measure of that quality in themselves or their loved ones? But instead of viewing it as the be-all and end-all of our emotional makeup, I expect that over time we will give it a less central place within the broader mosaic of desirable personal attributes. I aspire to be resilient and persistent and gritty—but I also hope to minimize trauma (to the extent possible) by taking smart, reasonable risks. It’s a sentiment that Conan O’Brien captured in his commencement address at Dartmouth College shortly after being fired as host of The Tonight Show: “Though you should not fear failure, you should do your very best to avoid it. Nietzsche famously said, ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ But what he failed to stress is that it almost kills you.” What we really need is a pathway toward strength and success that doesn’t require a near-death experience—and a future in which fewer people rank prison as the best thing that’s ever happened to them.

Do You Really Have to Fail to Succeed?

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