Learning From Your Mistakes

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

Shankar Vedantam:

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the 1940s, a teenager named Russell Solomon sold used records out of his father's drugstore in Sacramento, California. He had dreams of turning this enterprise into a full-fledged business. In the 1960s, he opened a small record store in the suburbs of Sacramento. He called it Tower Records. The business took off. Russell Solomon opened storefronts in Los Angeles, in New York City, even Japan. By the seventies, Tower Records had become a musical mecca, which stores frequented by the most famous artists in the world.

John Lennon commercial:

... shop Tower Records in the heart of Sunset Strip tonight and every night of the year until midnight. It is a good place. And Tower...

Shankar Vedantam:

Tower grew into an international billion-dollar empire. In the late 1990s, Tower took on $110 million in debt to expand the business even further. Around the same time, music fans were turning to the internet to get their tunes. Digital file-sharing sites like Napster exploded in popularity.

Napster clip:

You don't need to own music to have music to have music.1.5 million songs. Unlimited access...

Shankar Vedantam:

Tower's sales began to decline. More disruptors showed up, but Russell Solomon refused to see the threat for what it was, an existential risk to the business he had built.

Russell Solomon:

As for the whole concept of beaming something into one's home, that may come along someday, that's for sure. But it will come along over a long period of time, and we'll be able to deal with it and change our focus and change the way we do business. As far as your CD collection or our CD inventory for that matter, it's going to be around for a long, long time, believe me.

Shankar Vedantam:

Tower Records filed for bankruptcy in 2004. It's easy to hear the story and think, "How could someone so successful ignore such a serious threat?" Why is it, when faced with possible failure, so many entrepreneurs, leaders, and managers bury their heads in the sand? The one thing we don't ask, how often do we make that same mistake too?

Today, we begin a two-part miniseries that examines one of the most serious limitations we face as human beings. Whether we are seven or 70, many of us have trouble learning from failure and setbacks. And when the shoe is on the other foot, when we are in a position to help a colleague or friend identify some glaring shortcoming, many of us hesitate to speak plainly, worried we will come across as rude. What happens in the brain when we receive negative feedback and psychological techniques to help us seize the tools of learning and success? This week on Hidden Brain.

Think about the last time you tried to do something difficult. Maybe you tried to write a novel, or pay off a debt, or apply to college. Chances are there were ups and downs along the way. Maybe you accomplished your goal or maybe it was just out of reach. As a small child, Lauren Eskreis-Winkler had her own ambitions. She dreamed of becoming a classical pianist. Her mother was trained at Julliard and served as her teacher. Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

Thank you so much for having me.

Shankar Vedantam:

Lauren, there was a time when you were five or six when your mother would give you feedback on how you were doing on the piano. How would you react to her feedback?

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

I'd get pretty upset. I think often the lessons would end early because I'd have trouble digesting the feedback and really sitting with it and doing things again. So when it was positive feedback, it was great. And when it was negative feedback, I still remember to this day the difficulty involved in swallowing that and accepting that I wasn't perfect, that my mother saw that there was something that needed to be corrected.

Shankar Vedantam:

So as you got older, Lauren, you found yourself especially enjoying your piano practices on Tuesdays. What was special about Tuesdays?

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

Oh, gosh, I love Tuesday. So the magical thing about Tuesday is that that was the day when our cleaning lady came, and cleaning ladies are wonderful, and they're also so noisy, right? There's the vacuums and the mops. And so I remember it was so wonderful; I'd be playing in the living room and she'd be vacuuming the red carpet. And so I'd see my hands playing the notes and I would hear in my head how I wanted the piece to sound, and all I could hear was the vacuum. And so that was kind of like the ideal, right? You're playing and you don't have to, so to speak, face the music. You don't have to actually listen to all the problems. It just sounded exactly the way I wanted it to in my head.

Shankar Vedantam:

I understand there was a time in your perhaps early adolescence when your mom would tell you to take breaks from the piano, but you found it hard to take this piece of feedback as well, even when you were on vacation?

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

Yeah. So my family, we would take a vacation and who knew a piano could fit in the backseat of a four-door sedan, but it can. And-

Shankar Vedantam:

Wait, a piano can fit in a sedan?

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

Yeah. So it was like a very advanced electric piano. It was a Yamaha. So at my begging, my parents would load it into the backseat of the car and we'd take it with us on vacation. And so we'd drive and we'd take the piano. So I had this down pat. Every summer, I was not going to lose three weeks practicing. And then one summer my parents almost got me. They said, "Well, Lauren, this summer we're going to Europe, so you can't bring your piano." So not to be deterred, I actually figured out the hotel we were staying at, and I contacted all the nursing homes within a three-mile radius of the hotel and scheduled these performances. And by the way, people in Europe actually appreciate classical music. It was kind of amazing.

Shankar Vedantam:

What came from your inability to listen to your mother's counsel about taking breaks, Lauren?

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

Yeah, so eventually I developed tendonitis. Yeah, my mother was very psychologically wise as well. She was a physician, so part of her advice really was from a medical standpoint saying, "You can't do this all the time. You need to take breaks. You need to rest. That's the nature of your body physically. It's the nature of the brain that you need breaks." So yeah, it was too much of a good thing.

Shankar Vedantam:

I understand that you began studying with your mom again as you grew older. And again, she would tell you to practice playing in a way that felt uncomfortable to you. What was her suggestion about the way you played your music, Lauren?

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

So at the peak of my seriousness on the piano, I was probably practicing six to eight hours a day.

Shankar Vedantam:

Oh my gosh.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

And one of the most effective things you can do is that you can start from random measures in the piece. So of course, you can start from the first measure of the first movement, the first measure of the second movement. But what happens if you get lost in the middle of the first movement? You need these ports, these ports of safety that you can return to, should you lose your place, be able to pick yourself up.

Shankar Vedantam:

And so your mom told you to start in the middle in some ways rather than starting at the start.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

Absolutely. And to practice over and over. I didn't want to be interrupted and for her to say, start four measures hence or start four measures behind where you just started, that didn't feel enjoyable. And yet being able to just throw yourself in and start from any measure, that's crucial when it comes to performance.

Shankar Vedantam:

In high school, Lauren got an opportunity to audition at the Curtis Institute of Music, one of the most competitive music schools in the world. She had to perform in front of Eleanor Sokoloff, a famous pianist who had been teaching at Curtis since 1936.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

So as you can imagine, I was pretty nervous. This is like the culmination of all of my dreams, of someone who had been practicing all day every day. Even though I was only a teenager, I had already sacrificed so many things for this goal. And so I went in and I started playing, and the worst thing that could have possibly happened happened, which is I lost my place. So I was in the middle of a Bach fugue and I have these four world-famous pianists looking right at me, and I fumbled, and I didn't immediately recover. And after a few seconds, I can still hear this sound in my head; Eleanor Sokoloff took her pencil and started wrapping it against the table and said, "That'll be all." And that was it.

Shankar Vedantam:

I mean, in some ways, this was the very advice your mom was giving you, Lauren, which is if you get lost, you need to be able to restart in the middle without going back all the way to the start of the piece.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

A hundred percent.

Shankar Vedantam:

Lauren was heartbroken. Her dream of becoming a classical pianist did not come to pass, but her experience did give her a useful window into how we all listen to observations and advice. When we come back, Lauren becomes a researcher and explores the psychology of feedback, criticism, and failure. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Growing up, Lauren Eskreis-Winkler wanted to be a professional classical pianist, but throughout her adolescence, Lauren ignored feedback from her music teachers time and time again. She eventually bombed an audition at her dream music school. It's a painful story, but it's also a relatable one. It demonstrates what many of us do when we are given feedback we don't like. We ignore it.

Lauren, after you became a psychologist, you studied how people respond to feedback. How do signals of failure affect people's feelings?

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

Failure makes everyone feel terrible. It kind of doesn't matter who you are, how successful you are, or how small the failure is. I'd say that's the general conclusion of dozens of experiments that have been run to date.

Shankar Vedantam:

Lauren and her colleagues once ran an experiment which required people to learn from their mistakes. It was called the Facing Failure Game.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

So this was a study run with customer service representatives where we gave them this Facing Failure Game, which is basically just a multiple choice test. So they're going through and we're asking them multiple choice questions that have only two answer choices. And so if you guess correct and you learn the right answer, well, now you know what the correct answer is because we told you. But crucially, if you get it wrong and you're told your answer was incorrect, well, you got the exact same information as people in the success condition because there are only two answer choices. And if you are paying attention, you should now know what the correct answer is regardless of your condition. And so what we find over and over again, whether you are a customer service representative or just a participant in the United States or from many different walks of life, we find that people who are given the failure feedback, they learn significantly less than the people who received the success feedback.

Shankar Vedantam:

The people who were told, "You're right," were more likely to retain the answer to the question. Their minds were able to hold on to the information. The people who were told, "You're wrong," were less likely to do so.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

People who are getting the correct feedback, they're tuning in, they're paying attention, and they're learning in a way that people in the failure condition are not.

Shankar Vedantam:

Our resistance to learning from failure is compounded by a second broader problem, our fear of bad news. Researchers have found, for example, that investors stop checking their stock portfolios when the stock market drops. We often will go out of our way to put our heads in the sand and avoid bad news even when this information may be useful to us.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

There's a whole body of research showing that it kind of doesn't matter how big the consequence is. So it could be literally your life savings are on the line and you're not checking the stock market when it goes down because you're so scared of getting negative information about yourself or about your investments.

Shankar Vedantam:

I remember there was one other study which looked at people who were given a test for a sexually transmitted disease, and people refused to come back and get their test results because they preferred not to know if they had the disease rather than find out.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

Exactly. So again, here what you have is it doesn't matter if it's life and death. It could literally be a matter of life and death, and what people are more focused on than the long-term benefits of learning is how am I going to feel in the moment? It's almost like you can't overestimate people's desire to avoid pain and seek pleasure in the moment.

Shankar Vedantam:

So we've been talking really about two things here, but they're obviously related. We've been talking about failure and we've been talking about feedback, negative feedback and failure. Now, we ignore both those things, but I want to understand the relationship between the two because you argue that failure in some ways is a form of feedback.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

Yes. So I think failure broadly defined is not achieving a desired goal. And so in that sense, failure can take many different forms, whether it's a broad goal like health, and the HIV test is going to tell you, "No, you're not healthy," or whether it's about loss of money or whether it's about simply not doing well in a multiple choice test. All of these ways are getting at that broad concept of failure of there's some signal in the environment telling you that you are not achieving your desired goal.

Shankar Vedantam:

What keeps us from paying attention to this feedback? It turns out, this is a surprisingly complex question. In fact, one reason many of us are bad at learning from failure is that we don't understand that there are many barriers at play. Here's the first. Lauren and her colleagues asked players how they felt before and after playing the Facing Failure Game. They found that after guessing the wrong answers, people reported having lower self-esteem. They ignored failure for the same reason Lauren tuned out her own mistakes on the piano. Failure bruises our ego.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

What we found over and over again is the real reason that people aren't learning and aren't engaging is because it's interpreted as a reflection of the self. And everyone has a really strong drive to see themselves as a competent, good, capable person.

Shankar Vedantam:

I understand that some researchers found that our desire to protect our self-esteem is so great that we sometimes are even willing to change our views about how much we want to succeed in order to avoid negative or harsh feedback.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

Yeah, so this is often referred to as the sour grape effect. And what these researchers find is that a failure gets you to change your beliefs, your values about what you want, so you fail. And then just like in Aesop's Fable, the fable of the fox with the sour grapes, when you can't reach something, when you fail to get it, you convince yourself, I didn't really want it in the first place.

Shankar Vedantam:

So we've looked at the emotional reasons we ignore failure. We can see that it undermines our confidence, it makes us feel bad about ourselves, lowers our self-esteem. But there are also other reasons we don't like to hear what we've done wrong. After you graduated from college, Lauren, you decided to write a book based on an independent project you conceived of in college. What was it about and how did you go about writing this book?

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

Yeah, so I basically went around the world and I looked at all these different forms of education. I was very interested in success and achievement and how people develop. And so I went around the world and I was kind of like an ethnographer studying these different models of education. And then I wrote a book. And so yeah, basically for two years after college, I was in a separate master's program, but from 6:00 AM to 9:00 AM every morning I would wake up and work on this book, this manuscript. I submitted it to every publisher who I thought might be interested and received a rejection letter from every one.

Shankar Vedantam:

Now, I imagine that after you started receiving these rejection letters, in some ways you were dealing with failure. I mean, you were dealing with feedback that in some ways people were not buying the book, but at this point, something else had also kicked in, which is you had invested all of this time and effort in writing the book. And so in some ways you were deeply invested in sticking to the course.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

Yeah, absolutely. It's that you're so far down a course that now changing direction is ... it's almost demoralizing, right? Because you're losing, not just that minute and not just your future vision, which is often what you're losing when you change course, but also all that past work that was invested, the hours, the blood, the sweat, the tears, everything that went into it.

Shankar Vedantam:

I'm wondering if people sometimes fail to see the value in failure because they're so focused on succeeding. This happened to you earlier in your life when you were learning to swim and your coaches would give you pointers on technique. Tell me what happened, Lauren.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

Yeah, so I was learning to swim, and so the way the class was structured was the instructor would teach us some new skill and we'd all be kind of practicing it, paddling around the pool, and then we'd do a race. So you're racing against all the other little kids in your group who you'll never see again, but it didn't really matter to me that I'd never see them again. I really wanted to win. And my teacher actually used to call me motorboat because I was so fast and I would win all the races, every single one. But the reason he called me motorboat was because I never came up for air.

Shankar Vedantam:

Oh my God.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

So I calculated that I could make it from one end of the pool to the other, not breathe, and win the race. And so I did win the race, but to this day, I am a terrible swimmer. All the techniques that I should have been practicing during those lessons, I was so focused on winning that I wasn't learning. And I think that often is the trade-off that people face, this kind of performance versus learning trade-off, where either you're so focused on performing and how you look and how you're stacking up, that you forget to learn.

Shankar Vedantam:

And of course, if you actually had taken the time to learn, it would've actually been bad for your performance because now if you're actually breathing as you're swimming, you're going to be slower than you would've been if you were not breathing. But of course, in the long run, it's going to make you a better swimmer. So there's a trade-off here between how much you're learning and whether you're winning, and in the moment you chose victory over learning.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

Right. Yeah. So I think what wisdom looks like is being able to distinguish when you should be performing versus when you should be learning. And I would say all of us, particularly my 10-year-old self in the pool, but all of us probably overestimate the degree to which we should be performing versus learning.

Shankar Vedantam:

Yeah. Well, one of the things I'm wondering about is that sometimes there is this other wrinkle to failure, which is that I think many of us know and have heard, that it's really important to take note of people who have failed many times before they succeed. But in some ways we draw the wrong lesson from those stories, which is we draw the lesson that failure is an obstacle and we just need to be persistent in overcoming this obstacle. And if we can be persistent enough, then failure will yield to success. Instead of saying failure in fact is actually our friend, it's actually telling us something about how to change course. So it's not just a matter of persistence in overcoming the obstacle, it's actually learning from what the feedback is telling us to actually modify what it is that we're doing.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

In the best-case scenario, failure, it's a gift. It is information. Information that if you're going about and just succeeding, you never get. So before I got married, I remember I was talking to golden couples, people who are in their 50th anniversary and asking them for advice, and just by chance at the time I happened to be living down south in the home of a lady who had just been divorced, and I actually thought she gave amazing advice. In some ways she had thought so deeply about relationships in a way that when things are going really well, I think you can take it for granted and not be as thoughtful. So yeah, I think in the best-case scenario, failure really is a gift. You extract information and you learn things that otherwise you couldn't have.

Shankar Vedantam:

Lauren and her colleagues have found that people systematically overestimate what they can learn from success and underestimate what they can learn from failure. In one study, they found that negative movie reviews are far more predictive of how a movie does at the box office than positive reviews.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

So what we find is that there's something that distinguishes failure from success, which is that failure almost always is unexpected and success is expected, which is to say that you are aiming for success and people are almost never aiming for failure. And so what this means is that just in the way we communicate, we often say more about events and experiences that are unexpected than those that are expected. So imagine in the newspaper, like a two-page spread about the underdog who wins, whereas when the favorite champion wins, there's kind of less to say. And so what we did was we combed Rotten Tomatoes and other movie review websites for negative reviews of movies that had just come out as well as positive reviews. And what we found is that if you show participants, like any average Joe, you show people negative reviews of all of these comparison movies, they can predict which movie is going to gross more money at the box office the following week.

It's kind of like there's all this information in a negative review. When you go to a movie and you expect it to be good and it's not good, you say more. Whereas when your participant is in a different condition, they see positive reviews of all of these comparison movies, they can't tell the difference between them. They have no idea which movie is going to do better versus do worse. So we actually found the same thing among Oscar-winning films. So all the films that were nominated for the Oscars for Best Picture, we again called negative reviews and positive reviews, and we find that from negative reviews in advance of the Oscars, our participants were able to predict which film was going to win Best Picture. Whereas from positive reviews, they were no better than chance.

Shankar Vedantam:

There's an old saying, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." When we hear this advice, most of us focus on the last part, the bit about getting up and trying again. We celebrate resilience but often skip over the benefits of failure. When we come back, how to get better at listening to feedback. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Think of the last time you made an embarrassing error at work. Was your instinct to get it fixed right away or did you want to ignore the problem? Many of us have a tendency to look away from our mistakes. Psychologists sometimes call this the ostrich effect, which is unfair to ostriches because, in fact, ostriches do not bury their heads in the sand in order to avoid bad news. Maybe we should call it the human effect because it's human beings who minimize problems, get defensive or even pin the blame on someone else.

At Northwestern University, psychologist Lauren Eskreis-Winkler studies this tendency. She says a big problem is that many of us consistently underestimate how common failure is. Lauren, you wanted to see how accurately people predict failures in various domains, and this includes launching a new business or getting involved in a romantic relationship, or even how often patients die at hospitals. What did you find?

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

We find that people systematically, pollyannaishly underestimate the true rate of failure. So we find this among laypeople and experts. We basically ask people to estimate the rate at which things go wrong across personal, national, and international context. So we actually looked at over 30 life domains. Relationships, what's the rate at which relationships break up? What's the rate at which national security fails? What's the rate at which businesses go under? And we find that it doesn't really matter the domain. What we find is this consistent underestimate. Across the board, it doesn't matter if these are health failures, business failures, failures of national security, across the board, people are thinking that failure happens less than it actually does.

Shankar Vedantam:

One of the most fascinating domains I think you looked at was within the National Hockey League. Tell me what you found, Lauren.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

So I love this example, having never watched a hockey game myself. And that's actually the reason I love it, which is because even for someone like me who has never been to a hockey game who can only name one hockey team, even I know that 50% of the time hockey teams win and 50% of the time they lose. And yet what we find is that when we put this question to participants, we ask them to estimate for each of the 30 some teams in the NHL, what was their win rate and what is their loss rate? What we find is that they overall estimate that over 50% of the time teams are winning, which is a logical impossibility.

Shankar Vedantam:

I'm wondering, Lauren, if one reason this happens is that we're all reluctant to share stories about our failures, even when those stories might be helpful to others. Do you think it's possible our reluctance to share our failures could play a role in our misperceptions about the frequency of failure?

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

Definitely. And I think that's the most intuitive way to understand this phenomenon, that you can think of, for example, the toxic positivity of social media. When people are talking about themselves, they're very reluctant to share things that went wrong. They're over advertising success, under advertising failure. I think one of the most interesting pieces of what we find in this research is that it's not just people talking about themselves, it's also people talking about others. For example, to go back to the NHL, if you look at headlines of teams winning versus teams losing, you find the exact same pattern that we find in people's underestimation, which is to say if the news was "totally accurate", 50% of the times there would be a headline about a team winning and 50% of the time it would talk about a team losing. And yet it's very skewed.

They're much less likely to report on a team losing than a team winning to emphasize that aspect of the experience. And that just goes across domains; hospitals, there's so many more articles about a hospital winning an award than a hospital failing to be hygiene compliant.

Shankar Vedantam:

Lauren, we talked earlier about a study where you asked people to play a game and learn from failure, and you discovered that many people found this very difficult to do. But in one version of the study, volunteers watched someone else play the game. What happened in this case?

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

So if you are personally the one failing, you are learning a lot less from failure than from success. But if we make a very, very small tweak, so if you are looking over the shoulder of somebody else who is failing or succeeding, there's no difference. So you're basically able to extract the information from failure that you are able to extract from success, as long as your personal ego is not involved in the experience.

Shankar Vedantam:

And in some ways, this points to a mechanism by which we can actually learn from feedback, which is if the feedback is not being given to us directly, it becomes easier for us to process it.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

Absolutely. Right. It's that you now don't have your own self-esteem involved. You don't personally feel threatened, and so you're able to do that crucial thing that's required for learning, which is to pay attention and engage with the experience as opposed to tuning out.

Shankar Vedantam:

We've talked in different ways today, Lauren, about how failure can be your friend rather than an enemy. Early on in your teaching career, you were presenting research to a colleague and a friend gave you advice on how to change your own perception of criticism. What was this advice?

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

I don't know if you've ever sat in for an academic talk. It depends what department you're in, but as you move closer to econ or the hard sciences, it can get pretty argumentative and it's always so critical. And so her very astute advice was, "Lauren, when you walk into one of these kind of contentious environments where everyone is picking apart everything you've worked on for the past year, view it as a collaboration. Instead of walking in and being me versus them, us versus them, you say, 'Hey, these are people that are trying to make my research better.'"

Shankar Vedantam:

I mean, in some ways I think this is pointing to the idea that when we fail at something, it's the thing that we are doing that has failed. It's the audition that has failed, the book that we're writing. So we say that we failed, but it might actually be more accurate to say the project has failed. I mean, putting some distance between ourselves and the thing we are working on allows us to ask what's best for the project rather than feeling that every signal of failure is a reflection of our personal failure.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

Absolutely. I think one of the most effective things you can do is kind of dissociate yourself from the project exactly like you're saying, and maybe even ... The people who I see who are most successful at this or the times in my life when I feel like I've been most adept and able to deal with failure, it's like you get so interested in the task or you care so much about the thing you're working on that it's almost like that is separate from your own ego. So a litmus test I often apply in my own research is would I work on this research project and would I invest hour upon hour in this project if my name didn't go on it? So if I could just remove the self and how much I'm doing this in order to bolster my ego and ensure my self-esteem versus how much am I doing this, because I actually care about the work. And so I do think the more you're able to disentangle those two things and the more you can say, "I'm doing this because I really believe in the work," the less failure matters.

Shankar Vedantam:

One of the more intriguing lines of research into how we can get better at accepting feedback has to do with giving people an opportunity to give others feedback. Tell me about a study you ran where you asked students to give advice to their classmates.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

We approached students, but actually we did this across many different domains. We approached people who, it didn't matter what they were struggling with, they had some sort of goal they were trying to achieve that they weren't quite getting. And I think the natural reaction when someone is struggling is to position them as a receiver, say, "You need help and I'm going to give you this resource or this advice or whatever it is," and we did the exact opposite. We said, "What if you give advice to somebody else? You've been struggling with smoking for 20 years, you must know so much more about this than I do or than anyone else knows. Can you give advice to someone else?" Likewise, we approached students in school and we said, "Could you give advice to a younger student?" What we found is that among middle school students, for example, the act of giving advice leads you to invest more in your homework over the following month, to spend more time on your homework than a student who was matched up with a teacher who gave them advice on how they should do better.

Shankar Vedantam:

Why do you think this works this way, Lauren? What is it about giving other people advice that makes us feel more confident or more invested in what we are doing?

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

I think when we fail repeatedly ... We're students in school and we're just getting Cs or we're trying to quit smoking and we just can't seem to do it, what that really robs you of is your confidence. You thought you could do this thing and now you feel totally demoralized and you can't really do it. And so I think the act of giving advice, it's like suddenly restoring you to a position of confidence. And so I think what it does is it reminds people of all of the things they already know. Advice is kind of like a biased memory search in which you scan your memory and you remind yourself of all the things that you do know how to do correctly, whereas you might otherwise focus on all the things you cannot do.

Shankar Vedantam:

One thing I've noticed, Lauren, is that when I'm talking to people who really know what they're doing, are experts in their fields, these are often people who are better able to accept negative feedback or critical feedback. And I've always thought this must explain why it is they're good at doing things because they're good at accepting feedback. But what you're saying right now actually puts a twist on it. Part of being a real expert might mean that you feel so confident about the many, many things that you know well, that when someone gives you feedback about one small dimension about what it is that you're doing, you're able to accept that because your expertise is giving you so much confidence that protects and bolsters your self-esteem in general. Is that plausible?

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

That's definitely true. As an expert, you're standing on this mountain of experience, this mountain of confidence, and I think some of the research that best supports what you're saying is done by Ayelet Fishbach where she finds that when you're a novice, you literally are asking different questions of the world than when you're an expert. So the question that a novice is asking over and over and over is like, do I belong here? Imagine a freshman in college, should I be at college? Is this where I should be? Am I good at this? So that's a novice, and that's why when they meet with failure, that can be so demoralizing because it's an answer to the question of like, "No, you don't belong here." Contrast that with an expert who is asking a very different question. They know they belong. They've belonged here for 10 or 15 or 20 years. They're asking, "How do I improve?" And so when they get something wrong or they fail, it's exciting. It's like, "Wow, I just learned something."

Shankar Vedantam:

Another way to get used to failure is to give yourself low-stakes ways to practice things you want to get good at. You call this failing in the dark. I love that phrase. Tell me how you implemented this idea to become a better writer, Lauren.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

So I actually stole this tip from chess masters. So chess masters have a very ingenious way of learning from the great grandmasters. So if you can't get Garry Kasparov to sit down and teach you chess, chess players in training have figured out how to do this. And so what they do is they get the published games of grandmasters and they sit down with the published game, and then you're essentially playing chess with Garry Kasparov. You're sitting down and you see, oh, how would I make a move in this board? And then you open the book and you see, what move did he make? And you compare and contrast. You say, "Oh, that's so interesting. Why did he move his pawn when I thought I should move my bishop?" And in this way, you really are, it's like as though you had paid Garry Kasparov $10,000 an hour to sit down and teach you chess, whereas it's actually totally free. So as a totally impoverished grad student, I realized that I wasn't going to get Stephen King to sit down and teach me writing, but I could use this exact same technique and fail in the dark.

So what I did was, I was particularly interested in improving my scientific writing. And so I would isolate writing from the best people in my field. So how does Marty Seligman write an abstract? He is the best of the best. And so I would, in bullet points, summarize his abstract, put it away for a week, and then try and reconstruct an abstract based on just those bullet points. And then I'd pull Marty Seligman's abstract out of the drawer and compare my abstract to his. Now, anyone who's ever been in a room with Marty Seligman knows that he can give some pretty direct and intimidating feedback, and so it's like I got to fail in the dark. I get to get all of this amazing feedback of like, "Oh, wow. Marty would suggest I should be writing shorter sentences or I should be referencing a different literature." And so I always found this to be an awesome way to get advice from not just people who are good, but people who are great, to allow yourself to fail and receive criticism in a way that is totally not ego-threatening.

Shankar Vedantam:

And of course, part of the reason it's not ego-threatening, Lauren, is that the feedback is actually coming from you. Marty Seligman is not in the room with you telling you that you did something wrong. You are telling yourself that you did something wrong, and that's much easier to stomach than hearing from an expert or another authority figure.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

Yeah, exactly.

Shankar Vedantam:

What do we do with the fact that feedback about our failures can sometimes be wrong? In other words, the person giving the feedback for whatever reason has misleading feedback and listening to that feedback in fact would be problematic.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

I think that's where expertise helps a lot. I think the more expert you become, the more able you are to have your own barometer. Not just be tossing about from this feedback ... a ping pong ball from this to that and this to that, but to actually have your own internal sense of what's correct and where you want to be headed. Of course, I think hindsight is 2020, and a lot of times you don't actually know in the moment what the true correct thing is to do. But again, I think focusing more on the process than the outcome. Thinking in the process, "Am I making this decision from the right mindset? Am I doing it just to avoid failure or just to avoid negative feelings, or am I able to really put it in perspective and make a reason choice in this moment?"

Shankar Vedantam:

One of the things that I think you've addressed in your work, Lauren, is to distinguish between challenges that are proximate and larger challenges that might actually be more important. So in other words, when you're working towards a goal, there are a series of small challenges we face. We're trying to play a piece from Bach and then we are encountering a whole bunch of problems in individual measures as we are playing. But the individual measures of problems we're having shouldn't allow us to take our eyes off the big goal, which is ultimately we want to play a beautiful piece of music. You call this building a goal pyramid. Can you talk about this idea and how it can help us absorb failure and absorb feedback about the mistakes we're making?

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

Sure. This is research from other very illustrious goal researchers. And the idea is that if you have sort of a north star, if you know what you're going towards, then it helps put all the sort of little failures in perspective, such that you wouldn't get bogged down in any single thing or even if you do, that you would remind yourself, what is that north star? What is the thing that you really want to achieve? Such that like the micro failures, they might hurt, they might not feel great, but reminding yourself that's not the ultimate goal.

Shankar Vedantam:

I'm thinking of, on a grand scale, Abraham Lincoln famously appointed a team of rivals, and many of the people in his cabinet didn't think highly of him. They insulted him, backstabbed him. He also made mistakes and failures, but he took many of these problems and insults in stride because he was focused on the larger goal of winning the Civil War and ending slavery. And in some ways, I think that's what you're talking about here. So if you're actually focused on the big goal, the smaller problems that you encounter and the smaller signals of failure you encounter become less painful to endure.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

Absolutely. And what an amazing leader. All of our leaders, if they were only like this, that there's no kind of ego involved. It's kind of what we were talking about before, about separating the goal from the self. And if you really care about the goal so much ... I believe that if Abraham Lincoln could have been president and it just would've said anonymous, he still would've done it and he would've done an amazing job at it. I think he believed in the goal that he was striving towards. He saw value in it, and so much so that he's inviting those personal attacks. He truly doesn't care when the self is threatened because that's not where his eyes are. That's not what he's looking at.

Shankar Vedantam:

I mean, in some ways what you're really saying, Lauren, is that it becomes easier to accept feedback about our failures when we're committed to something that is bigger than ourselves.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

I think that's definitely true, because really what the hiccup comes in is when you get tunnel vision on yourself. It takes up the whole picture. Suddenly it's about how this experience reflects on you and what it says about you and your capabilities and your potential. And instead, I think focusing on the task is absolutely the way to go.

Shankar Vedantam:

Have you tried to apply this insight in your own life?

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

So I definitely find that the things that are hardest are often the domains where I care so much about the goal that I'm not shielding myself from negative feedback, and I'm looking at it directly and I'm looking at it in the eye, and I'm just trying every day to get better. So I think this is where a lot of parents will relate. I think that's one of the reasons parenting is so hard is because everybody cares about their kids more than they care about themselves. And so what that means is that you are unconsciously ... that's just the way you are. You're automatically putting lessons and development and learning and growth above how you feel about yourself in the moment. Parenting would probably feel a lot better if you didn't pay attention to any of that stuff and you just barreled through it. But I think it's a prime example of you care about the larger goal and you care about it so much that you constantly are thinking about how you can do better and what went wrong and putting yourself right in the bullseye of failure and constructive feedback and improvement.

Shankar Vedantam:

One other thing I want to run by you, Lauren, is that given the challenges and limitations we have in talking about failure, there are some people who've said we should actually become better at talking about our failures and more open about our failures, and that'll help other people think about failure differently. So Johannes Haushofer, an academic, took this idea to heart and created what he called a CV of Failures, which listed every failure he'd experienced dating back to the start of his career. What do you think of this idea, Lauren?

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

I love it. I think what our research consistently shows is that people don't share their failures. They don't talk about it. And so we have kind of this pluralistic ignorance about what achievement actually looks like. And so it's kind of like, why do we all feel terrible about failure? Partly because the experience doesn't feel good, but also because you have these wildly unrealistic expectations about what success actually looks like. And so I love that he published a CV showing all the ways in which he had failed to contrast with all the CVs that we're always putting online of all of our successes. And my favorite line in that CV of Failure is actually the last line where he says his meta failure is that this CV he posted, it's received more media attention than his entire body of academic scholarship.

Shankar Vedantam:

Do you have a CV of failures yourself, Lauren?

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

I do. So as part of my teaching, when I teach my students, we all create them. And so let me tell you, my CV of failure, it's a lot longer than my CV of success.

Shankar Vedantam:

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler is a psychologist at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. Lauren, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler:

Shankar, thank you so much for having me.

Shankar Vedantam:

In our next episode, we'll explore the flip side of our reluctance to absorb negative feedback. We look at our reluctance to offer negative feedback to others and what to do about it. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Brigid McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero today is Kayla Dreessen. Kayla works in the studio where we recorded today's episode. She helped make the whole process smooth and enjoyable by handling it with care and kindness. Thank you, Kayla. If you would like to help us build more stories like this, please act now. Visit support.hiddenbrain.org and join the hundreds of other Hidden Brain listeners who have signed up to help. Again, that's support.hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.