Hey friends,
Last week, I talked about the concept of pendulation – something I learned from a retreat hosted by Joe Hudson and the Art of Accomplishment team. This week, I’d like to share another key tidbit from the retreat: it relates to failure.
What happens in our brains when we process “failure”? Well, the brain’s “error detection system”, the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) activates, sending signals to the amygdala (our fear centre) and the hippocampus (which helps form memories). This creates a cocktail of emotions and memories that make us want to avoid similar situations in the future.
For example, if you were an ape challenging the alpha male and got beaten down, this cocktail of emotions and memories about your “failure” would disincentivise you from trying that again, at least for a long time. It’s not great for our survival to keep attempting things we’ve failed at before.
It’s not very “personal development” friendly, but the idea of “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” isn’t actually that helpful for our survival. When we fail at something, it’s a profound signal to our brains, bodies, and systems to not attempt that thing again for a while.
Why is this important? Well, it gives us a way to hack our brains when we’re trying to learn new things or accomplish anything. If we set up situations where failure is likely, it’s super demotivating. Most people will stop trying pretty quickly if they keep failing.
This is illustrated nicely by a study that Mark Rober did, which I reference in my book, Feel-Good Productivity (which you should totally read / listen to if you haven’t yet). He got 50,000 people to play a game where they were supposedly learning to code, but it was really just a big science experiment. The puzzle they were trying to solve was impossible. Half the group was told “You failed. Please try again.” The other half was told “You failed. You’ve lost 5 points. You now have 195 points. Please try again.” These were totally arbitrary “points” that had absolutely no bearing in the real world.
But what they found was pretty interesting – the group who were told they lost points (i.e., where the failure was emphasised) tried less than half as many times to solve the puzzle compared to the group that was simply told they failed. This echoes what most of us intuitively know to be true – failure doesn’t feel very good, and can be quite demotivating.
It does suggest that when we’re trying to learn new things or accomplish anything, we should try to set things up in a way that makes it hard for us to fail. For example, if I’m starting a new diet and my rule is that I “succeed” only if I stick to my calorie goal everyday, but I “fail” if I go over even once, it’s going to be really easy to fail. Same goes for building a YouTube channel or a business – if I tell myself I’m only succeeding if I stay consistent and make at least 1 video a week, I’m making it very easy for myself to fail because of these arbitrary rules I’ve created – for the record, every YouTuber / writer / business-owner in the world struggles with consistency: you’re not alone.
In the context of integrating learnings after the retreat, Joe and Tara emphasised how important it is to not think of ourselves as having failed if we “fall off” or don’t do something we intended to do. As soon as you label yourself as having failed, it becomes a profoundly demotivating force. It makes it less likely, rather than more likely, that you’ll continue to apply the learnings and grow from the experience.
Just like the concept of pendulation we talked about last week, I really like this because it allows us to have more forgiveness and grace for ourselves. But it also encourages us to rig the game in our favour.
When you’re playing games of personal improvement or trying to level up (and tbh, with everything in life), there’s very little point in making things harder for yourself than they need to be… unless of course, you’re doing that as a deliberate way to add more of a sense of challenge to make the thing feel more like “play”.
But that’s not what most of us do. Most of us create arbitrary rules for ourselves that make it quite hard to feel we’re succeeding, and distressingly easy to feel we’re failing. The trick is to set up the rules of the game so that even if you don’t stay as consistent or as intentional as you’d like, you avoid registering that as a “failure”.
We’re not doing this just because it’ll make us feel better (though there’s nothing wrong with that), but also because we recognise that every time we label ourselves as having failed, we’re sucking away some of our motivation to try again. This is hardwired into our brains.
Sure, you can probably fight against it, but why bother?
One really useful hack that I’ve been using for years around this is to simply label new things I’m trying as “experiments”. This is why in my book, all 54 strategies are labelled as “experiments”. Each chapter has 6 experiments for the reader/listener to try out. Framing anything as an experiment means that whether or not it “works”, the experiment is still successful. The point of an experiment is to gather data, not to win or lose.
Have a great week!
Ali xx
