The Science of Personality Podcast
The Science of Personality Podcast
Learning from Failure
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In the latest episode of The Science of Personality, Ryne and Blake discuss a topic that applies to pretty much everyone, and that is learning from failure. Let’s face it, nobody’s perfect, and we’ve all failed at some point throughout life. But failure, as bad is it might make us feel at the time, actually can be a positive if we learn and get better as a result of it.
People are the most consequential and dangerous forces on earth. Well, personality technology is about the nature of human nature, it's about people. And wouldn't that be useful to me? I can't think of a more important problem.
SPEAKER_01You're listening to the Science of Personality Podcast. Brought to you by Hogan Assessment, the global leader in personality assessment and leadership development since 1987. Your host of Hogan Chief Science Officer and world-renowned personality psychologist, Dr. Ryan Sherman, along with Hogan P your manager and resident storyteller, Blake Lepp.
SPEAKER_03Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Science of Personality Podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Sherman, along with my co-host, as always, Blake Lemp. Say hello, Blake.
SPEAKER_02Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Science of Personality Podcast, episode 107. Today, Ryan and I are going to talk about a topic that we think applies to pretty much all of us, and that is learning from failure. Let's face it, nobody's perfect, and we've all failed at some point throughout life. But failure, as bad as it might make us feel at the time, actually can be a blessing if we learn and get better as a result of it. So we thought this would be a fun and insightful topic to cover on the podcast. Ryan, this was a topic that you kind of enthusiastically brought to the table when we were chatting a couple of weeks ago. What got you interested in this topic in the first place?
SPEAKER_03Well, Blake, uh uh and full disclosure on this one, uh, you know, I I uh you know, but maybe our audience members don't know, I coach a youth baseball team uh through the spring and early summer months uh each year. And, you know, thinking about youth baseball and and thinking about baseball in general, is it's just really it's a they call it a game of failure, right? The greatest hitters of all time can fail 70% of the time and still be considered uh incredible. And and it's a real challenge for for young kids, particularly in youth baseball, because you start out uh when you're really little, nobody ever gets you out, right? And T-ball, you hit the ball, nobody gets you out, you run, you're always safe. Even as you get a little older and you get to coach pitch ball, that you still, if you're a good athlete, you're always safe. But as you get older and older, the other teams get better and better. And it's impossible to never get out. It's impossible to avoid failure in in the game of baseball. And and just thinking about that and thinking about what I talk with with my with my uh my players about uh about how to handle failure and how to deal with failure. Um, I was just really thinking about this concept of you know, how you know, why failure can actually be a good thing and the things that you can learn from failure. And, you know, the the real key thing that occurred to me, Blake, the the key takeaway is, and you know, to sort of spoil the entire episode two minutes in, um, is that the only way you can fail is if you fail to learn. And I think that that's really a key thing for these youth baseball players is that it's it's not about failing, it's about failing to learn from the mistakes. If you got out in at bat, what could you have done better? What did you learn from that at bat? Uh, but it's also applies to all kinds of, you know, sort of youth sports and tennis. If you got beat by an opponent, well, what did you learn? What did you learn from that match? What do you need to get better at? What are your weaknesses? And that it's not really a failure unless you learned nothing uh from that outcome. If you if you lost and you learned nothing, then then it's absolutely a failure. But as long as you're learning something, and that's the message that I'm conveying to my youth baseball team, as long as you're learning something, you're not failing. Even if it feels like you failed because you got out or you lost the game. Did we learn anything? Did we do anything that can make us better next time? Then it's not a failure after all.
SPEAKER_02Well, to our audience, so Ryan and I, you know, we spend about a good 10 or 15 minutes before we record these episodes, um, you know, getting everything lined out for the podcast. Um, I would say three to four minutes of those are getting everything lined out, and the rest is him telling me all about the baseball tournament tournament that he was coaching the previous weekend. So I know about as much about these kids as I would uh, you know, your your typical major league baseball franchise. So so just a little background on our end and what goes on behind the scenes, but back to the topic at hand, uh learning from failure. So let's start with something we're all familiar with, which is school. What does learning from failure look like in a school setting?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and thinking about this topic, Blake, and it's it might seem strange, and I don't know if we've ever talked about this on here before or not. You and I were talking the other day. I can't remember what things we've done episodes on and what things we haven't. Um, but you know, I I think back to when I was in school, and I think most people have this experience. When you're in school, when you're whether you're in elementary school or high school or at the university or whatever it is, and your teacher, your professor asks a question, right? And this is a very common occurrence. The teacher asks a question and they're waiting for volunteers to raise their hands to answer. And let's say you raise your hand to answer that question, and the teacher calls on you to provide your answer. Do you want to get that answer right or wrong? And I think most people assume that you you you want to get that answer right, right? That that's what you want, right? You you you wanna you want to get it right, you want to feel like you're smart and that you you knew knew the answer to the question. You you got your peers paying attention to you, right? So you want to create this reputation of yourself as as being right and smart. But ironically, when you answer that question right, you didn't learn anything. You just demonstrated that you already knew something, right? And so this was something that uh it was a major realization for me when I was in college and then on through grad school, I realized that actually it was better if I got the question wrong. And it was actually I found that when a professor asked a question that I knew the answer to, I refused to raise my hand. I thought, well, I already know the answer to that. I'm not gonna raise my hand. I can't learn anything from that. But when I didn't know the answer, that's when I raised my hand and took a guess. And I would get them wrong a lot. And for me, that was the whole goal because I knew when I got it wrong, and then the teacher corrected me or the professor corrected me and said, no, that's not right. It's this, that would stick with me. That failure was going to stick with me, and I was going to learn from that, and I was gonna remember that going forward, whether it was on a test or whether it was other some important uh moment in my work life or career, I was gonna remember that knowledge. Whereas if I got it right, I wasn't necessarily gonna remember it. In fact, I'm probably at risk for forgetting it because I'm sort of complacent thinking that oh, well, I already know this. All right. So it's sort of ironic that again, most of us think we want to get the question right, but actually you really learn when you get the question wrong. And so uh what I would try to encourage people to do who are students or in the classroom is to be wrong, to make a mistake, to make an error, um, not so much intentionally, but but to put yourself out there to take some risk, take some chances where you might be wrong, because that creates this really great opportunity for learning.
SPEAKER_02Well, this also reminds me of, and I'm kind of looking at this through a little bit different lens. I remember uh an Asian philosophy class I was in in college, and I don't even remember what the question was. And we had learned about all these different uh philosophers throughout, you know, uh uh Asian history. And I remember the question came, and I did not know the answer, especially not for sure. I remembered a lot of the names of these philosophers, but I just kind of blurred out an answer. Lo and behold, I got it right. And the teacher even kind of looked shocked. But I think even sometimes that risk of failure, the the taking that chance whenever the odds are against you and you end up getting it right can still stick with you kind of like failing whenever you're actually putting all your chips on the table and you don't have the greatest hand.
SPEAKER_03So yeah, well, that's a really good point, Blake, because I think you know the thing that you're combating when you when you decide to raise your hand, you decide to take, you know, you are combating the pressure that your professor or that your peers will think you're not very smart, or will think you're not paying attention, or will think you didn't read the assignment, right? So that there is definitely that that risk um uh of getting it wrong, and you have to confront that. And I think you're right that, of course, you know, just saying something nonsensical, right? If they ask you for for some you know Asian philosopher and you said 17, you know, you would, you know, okay, that doesn't, you know, you that's not what I mean by by being wrong, like we're not intentionally being wrong, but right, giving it your best guess, giving it your best shot, saying something you think could be right but is reasonable, I think you're absolutely right, Brake, like that even if you do get it right, you're still gonna learn because you weren't sure, right? You weren't sure if this was right. Um you're trying, you're putting yourself out there. You're you're honestly, you're really taking a sort of a hypothesis testing, a scientific approach to it. You're saying, I'm gonna try this and see if it works. And if it does, you learn something. And if it doesn't, you learn something. So either way, you're learning.
SPEAKER_02Well, and I did answer 17 on another question, but that's that's a topic for for another discussion. Uh uh now let's dive into the sports world. Of course, you know, our listeners uh well, they've already gotten their sports reference in this episode, but we're gonna continue down this path a little bit more. But uh diving into the sports world, obviously, you want to avoid failure in sports because you want to win. How could that be problematic?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so you know, it that I think the sports world, there's so many analogies. Of course, I've mentioned stuff with youth sports, but I think obviously this goes through all the way through high level. I mean, the Olympics are going on right now, right? Uh there's so many opportunities for learning from failure in athletics. And honestly, the the the athletes who never make it, uh the ones that that coaches give up on are the ones that that seem to have no ability to learn, that they can't improve. Uh, you know, I I remember certainly, I remember I had coaches in my life, but I've heard many coaches say this that uh you know the time to be concerned is when I stop giving you feedback. Because that means I don't think you can get any better. I don't think you can improve, I don't think you can learn, or possibly I think you're uncoachable, which is a topic, of course, we we've addressed on this podcast before. So there are lots of opportunities for learning from failure. I mean, sports is is great because you get immediate feedback, right? You get that immediate feedback of whether you were successful or you or you failed. Um, and so you can you can learn from failure there there all the time. But one one issue that can come up in sports is what happens if you're if you're really good? What happens if if you're not failing? Um it can be really problematic there as well. And one classic example that comes to mind for me is the University of Connecticut women's basketball team, which was very dominant for long stretches of time where they they weren't losing hardly any games, winning multiple championships. Like, gosh, at one point I think they won four straight. I think at another point they won either two or three in a row. Um, you know, just this incredible dynasty of winning where they would win, you know, almost 40 games a season and almost never lose any. Um Gino Ariema, the coach of that team, said one of the challenges, and it might sound arrogant, uh, but I don't think he he meant it this way. He said, one of the challenges for us is that we don't learn from our mistakes because they don't cost us, because we don't lose. Since we don't lose very much, we don't have many opportunities to learn. And I think he's exactly right is that you you learn so much more from failure. You learn more from your mistakes than you learn from your successes, right? And and honestly, this I mean, this is true in all kinds of other places. I know people who teach, you know, I don't have anything to do with this, but I know people who teach chess, right? And what do they tell people to review? They tell people to review the games that they lost. Review the games that you lost so that you can learn from your mistakes, learn from your errors and get better. What do people want to review? Which are the games that people want to go back and replay? They want to go back and replay the games that they won, the games that they played great, the games where they were fantastic, right? And you can learn a little bit from those games. But the real value is putting yourself through those painful games, the games where you didn't play well, the games that you lost. That's where there's a real opportunity for learning. And, you know, Gino Ariama's point was since we're not losing very many games, we're not learning a lot, which means we're not improving. We're not improving as quickly as we could. Now, you might argue, well, if you're already beating everybody, how fast do you need to improve? Well, you still need to improve because they're catching up. The other teams are going to be catching up because they are losing and they're learning from those losses, right? And so they're going to be catching up to you. And so, you know, you have both of these things going on in the sports world. You have teams that are losing or players or individuals that are losing who can learn from those mistakes, and the great ones will do. All the great players, all the great teams learn from their losses. They learn from mistakes. Heck, Blake, we started this podcast uh uh talking about uh the the last dance, the the Chicago Bulls dynasty, and Michael Jordan. That was the kickoff episode for this podcast. And all of the prelude to Michael Jordan's successes were filled with losses, filled with making it to the playoffs and getting beat, making it to the the the conference championship and getting beat, right? Never getting to to the finals, right? Having to learn from those failures, learning from defeat. Uh, I think I'm pretty sure it's an Aerosmith song, where the lyric is something to the effect of um sometimes you have to lose to learn how to win. And I think that's really the the reality is that in in the sports world, losses can teach you a lot. And that's how you learn how to win is by losing. And unfortunately, when you win a lot, it's it's hard to learn. It's hard to get better, it's hard to identify mistakes. It's easy to sort of rest on one's laurels um and not improve.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I do think that 1990 Chicago Bulls team is actually one of the greatest examples in sports um because you know they were they got beat by the Detroit Pistons uh what in the Eastern Conference Finals. Uh and it was due to they were they were just getting beat up. Detroit was being a lot more physical. They were they were stronger uh physically uh as a team than than the Bulls were. So what did the Chicago Bulls do? They they got in the weight room. They they they got they got stronger, they got tougher, they played, they played harder. And then what happened? Uh six out of the next eight years, they won uh the NBA championship. So that's I mean, that is a prime example of learning from failure. Um, and yeah, you're right. You can't, I mean, what they had gotten there without that. I I don't know. You would think that Michael Jordan would correct, would write that chip in some way, but I mean, history tells us that it took failure for them to get to where they eventually wanted to be.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I mean, very few people, I mean, gosh, I I talk about this with with kid with kids in youth sports or whatever it is all the time. You know, so many kids pick up some new activity and then maybe they get some early success and they think I'm really good, I'm gonna win forever. And then eventually they run into somebody who beats them or that they run into some tougher competition and and and they they can get down on themselves. They can go, oh geez, and maybe I'm not very good. And and what they have to realize is those people who beat you lost before too, right? Is that the reason they're the way they are? They didn't just wake up one day and be that good. They had to deal with failure and overcome that failure to get there.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so Ryan, can you describe an example of a team in athletics that failed to learn and one that learned from failure? We already talked about um the the Bulls a little bit, but I think you have a couple other examples um in your in your in your tool belt here. So can you describe a couple?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so I mean, as I mentioned, there you know, there's lots of examples. We yeah, we've as you mentioned, we talked about the bulls. We've also you know talked about you know Connecticut women's basketball and and um you know even trying to learn from wins, right? And and the difficulty that comes with that. Uh, you know, when I think about examples of teams um that that uh are are failing to learn from failure, right? So I look at a team like in Major League Baseball, the Los Angeles Angels. Um, this is a team that I think has made the playoffs one time in the last maybe 20 years, something like that. And they've had some really talented players. They've had um Shohe Otani was there, who's probably the bet best player in baseball right now. They've had Mike Trout there, who is the best baseball player. Uh I mean, at one period of time, they were the number one and number two best players in all of baseball. And still only made the playoffs one time. And that one time they're in the playoffs that they got swept. Um and and so what what's going on there? And then they've they've continued to do this, right? At one point in time, they they brought in Albert Poohs from the Cardinals. I mean, they've they've brought in some incredible talents, you know, first ballot, automatic Hall of Famers, and they just continue to do this over and over again, spend that money to bring in this talent, but it hasn't resulted in winning teams. And they continually get the same results, fourth out of fifth in the division, fourth out of fifth in division, fourth out of fifth in division, just over and over again. You don't really see any change or improvement. And this despite the fact that you know sports is are designed to you know give you higher draft picks and though, you know, to to increase your your chances of winning in the future if you're losing now, right? Um but we've still just seen continued failure. And and it and what that points out to me is just a failure to learn, right? That this is a team and a franchise that isn't learning from the mistakes that it's making. They're not, you know, it's just continuing to doing the same, doing the same thing that's led to failure. And and you know, just continuing to do that is is obviously uh not a recipe for success. And I might contrast that with a team like the Los Angeles Dodgers, which um has uh made dramatic changes over the last 20 years. And quite, you know, look, this wouldn't be our podcast, Blake, without talking about leadership. I mean, I think when you want to point to a source of failure, a source of failure to learn, you have to point to the leadership of the organizations. You know, the the Angels ownership. I think Artie Moreno bought the Angels in around 2003. Um, and and you know, I think they won a World Series pretty early on in his ownership tenure, but really, again, haven't done much since. And again, over the last 20 years, one playoff appearance um and and a lot of poor finishes. And if we're comparing that to the Los Angeles Dodgers, just down the road, right? Just minutes away location-wise. Um, you know, this is a team that that took had new ownership in 2012, uh, and uh since then has made the playoffs every year, except one, I think, since 2012. They won a World Series in 2020. Um first place in the division, first place in the division, first place in the division, repeat success. But where did that come from, right? Where did that, where did all that come from? Well, there was years of failure in the case of the Dodgers, years or years of failure to get to the you know, high expectations, no results, right? But this is the team that's learned from those, learned from those mistakes, learned from those failures. Instead of just saying, hey, we're gonna go buy the best players in the market, and they do sometimes, they do go out and get the best players in the market sometimes. Um they've they've committed to a strategy that looks at long-term success, right? Um, and and they've learned from from from their mistakes. When they've made mistakes, they've learned from it and moved on. And you know, a team like the Angels, again, just down the road from from the Dodgers, uh, just seems to not be learning, not learning from those mistakes.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I think if we're gonna look, I I I can't help but bring up uh the Oklahoma City Thunder. Um, I mean, they moved from Seattle to Oklahoma City, but whenever they were leaving Seattle, they left because that franchise was just not in good shape. It was it was in such poor shape that um the fans in Seattle uh decided not to vote to get a new arena. They were just gonna roll the dice and hope that the the franchise stayed there with their old uh kind of crumbling arena. And a group of investors comes in from Oklahoma City, buys the team, shakes things up a bit, and then next thing you know, they're competing at the highest level. They didn't they didn't quite win an NBA championship, but they got there and they kind of built it with that long-term strategy that you talked about. And now you look at them, yeah, those stars that they drafted three future MVPs that went on to to other places, but now they're just doing it all over again. Like they, you know, that didn't work, but they had they commit to that long term strategy, and here they are, they're gonna be the favorite uh in the Western conferences next year, and they're gonna do it with a bunch of players who are under the age of twenty five. So, I mean, that's just another example in basketball, I think, where Oh, go ahead, Ryan.
SPEAKER_03Well, well, yeah, I was gonna say, Blake, I think, you know, a phrase that comes to mind in the sports world is you know, this, you know, fool me once, shame on me, fool or fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, right? Right. Which, you know, ironically is that I think is the phrase that George Bush messed up the one time. Yeah. Um, in any case, uh the the point is that it's about learning, right? Okay, yes, you tricked me. You you and this happens all the time in the sports world. You think about basketball, the team runs a play, right? They run a play, you've never seen that play before, you weren't prepared for it, they beat you on that play, they got a basket. Okay, you know, good for them. But if they run that same play again and beat you again and you're not prepared for it, well, now it's really on you, right? That's a failure to learn from a mistake. You made a mistake, they exploited it, okay. Can you learn from that mistake? And I mean, you see it time and time again where some players and some coaches can quickly learn. They go, okay, we learned. And look, they talk about playoff basketball in the NBA. They talk about teams that win the regular season versus teams that win the regular. Kobe Bryant talked about this. Teams that win the regular season versus the playoffs. And one of the differences is the ability to adapt to what the other team's doing. Can I make an adjustment? Can I learn from the mistakes that we've made in the previous games? Because you're going to play the same team over and over and over again in the playoffs until there's a winner of a seven-game series. It's all about learning from failure. It's all about learning from mistakes. Um, whereas in the regular season, it's not as much because you're playing a different team every night. So um, yeah, it's just really critical. Learning from those mistakes is is essential, just both in the moment, in the single game, but also over the long-term strategy of a franchise.
SPEAKER_02No, you actually bring up a great point because we talked so much about kind of more the long term, but I think what you're referring to is that ability to do it within games. Um, you know, if it and I think American football is actually a great example to look at is, you know, if you follow a team that you know pretty well and you know that that team makes great adjustments at halftime. If something's going wrong in the first half, you can almost guarantee that the coaches are going to fix it at halftime. And so there, you know, I've there's teams I follow that whenever it gets to halftime and the score's tied, I already know that this is a win because it's because of that team's ability to adapt and make those in-game changes um from the failure that they learned in the first half. But so there's different ways to look at that long term or just being able to do it in the moment and adapt to what's happening at that time.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02But we've we've talked a lot about sports now, and um, I think you could tell that um Ryan and I both enjoy sports. So uh now that we've covered school and sports, let's get down to business and talk about well, business. What are some examples of businesses that fail to learn?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I think one of the classic examples of a business that failed to learn is is Kodak, right? And so, I mean, look, there's a number of things we can talk about with Kodak. You can talk about Kodak as a failure to recognize what business they're in. You can talk about Kodak as a as a failure to innovate, although I don't think that's actually true. I think that they were actually quite innovative, both in their film technology, camera technology. In fact, they invented the uh the digital camera, which ultimately sort of put them out of business. But um but it but it was about a failure to learn, really. That was really the issue, right? That they had um opportunities to say, uh, okay, we're gonna switch into this digital era, but they just came way too late and way too slow. Instead, they doubled down, they they reaffirmed their commitment to film. We are a film company. That's what we do. We do film, right? And this ultimately, that that sort of failure to learn from what's going on, failure to learn from mistakes, failure to learn what's happening around them, um, is ultimately what costs Kodak. So it, you know, it's it's not necessarily the failure to be late, to be late to the game. In fact, they weren't even really that late to the game from an innovation standpoint. Um, but but it's a it's it's that I'm gonna recommit to the mistakes, right? I've made a mistake. Okay, let's double down. Let's recommit to that mistake. That's what ultimately is gonna sink a business.
SPEAKER_02What about an example of a business that successfully learned from failure?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, there's actually a lot of these. And that's the really interesting thing, Blake. You talk we when you asked the question about what are some examples of businesses that didn't learn from failure? Well, quite frankly, it's hard to remember those because businesses and people who don't learn from failure become really forgettable. Like they go away, they disappear, they never make it, right? They they never get to uh the point of being well known, right? So um, but it's very easy to find businesses that have learned from failure, that have learned from mistakes and taken those mistakes to become to grow to greater heights and to more success. I think a really clear example of that is Coca-Cola, uh, which you know during my youth uh famously launched new Coke, which was a colossal failure. Um and but but but if you look at the brand now, there are so many things that are made by Coca-Cola. Most people don't even realize that these things are Coca-Cola products. Maybe, maybe you do because you recognize that the bottle has the same shape all the time. But but all of these products are, uh I see them as direct results from the failure of new Coke, right? When when that failure happened, these new products, these new marketing tips, these new strategies that they've developed all came from the lessons of that failure, right? So without that failure, you wouldn't have these new products. If that had been wildly successful, these these kind of products might not be, might not even exist today. And Coke might not be the company that it is today without that failure. So if we look at failure as this real opportunity to learn, the way Coca-Cola has, uh, Domino's Pizza is another place that's failed in lots of different ways many times and is now clearly the leader among the sort of big four pizza chains, um, right? Because that they learn from mistakes. They're right, they learn, they said, wow, these dining room things really aren't working out for us, right? So they learn from those failures, they learn from those mistakes and use those to um to be more successful. Amazon's another example of uh of a company that that's you know that that's made many mistakes, right? I mean, when you're a big company and you take risks, and I think that's what Jeff Bezos would say is that when you're a big company and you're gonna take some risks, you're you're gonna be wrong. You're going to make mistakes when you make decisions. What's really critical is can you learn from those mistakes? Just like the basketball player who gets beat on a play, the business person who makes a mistake, what's essential is do they learn from that mistake? Can they correct that mistake going forward? Have they uh learned from failure or or have they failed to learn?
SPEAKER_02I want to go on record saying that I, for one, am very happy that Coca-Cola uh you know learned from its its new Coke failure. Um I drink my weight in Coca-Cola, the the the OG, the original Coca-Cola, about every week. So um that's just hats off. I want to give my ringing endorsement to Coca-Cola. It's my favorite drink.
SPEAKER_03So uh when it comes to sponsorship.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, hey, Coca-Cola, if you're listening, we would love to bring you on as a sponsor. So what about entrepreneurs? You know, they fail much more often than they succeed. Can you talk a little bit about that?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so you know, but with entrepreneurs, I think that that's uh a really clear case where learning from failure is is essential. I think every great entrepreneur can list all the mistakes and failures and things and things that have gone wrong. So when I think about um yeah, well, I mean, there's uh Elon Musk for all of his uh you know uh pros and cons. Uh we'll we'll talk about failures and mistakes that he's made with some of the early businesses that he was involved in. I think Zip2 would be one uh example. Uh Bill Gates, I know he owned uh he started a company. What was the name of that company that he started? Um yeah, one of his early companies was it was not very successful. Oh, Traffodata, that's what it was called, Traffodata. Um, and it wasn't very successful. But he and Paul Allen, you know, the founders of Microsoft, got a lot of experience from it. And they took that experience um to create Microsoft. Um uh Walt Disney uh famously uh he had he had an animation studio called Lafogram, and that failed, went bankrupt. Um he also had created some characters uh that he lost the rights to. Um so you know he learned from those early experiences and you know, obviously created Mickey Mouse and the Walt Disney company. Um so there's lots of examples of Oprah Winfrey. Uh she was, I think she was a news anchor in Chicago. Um, and that didn't go well. She got really negative feedback, uh, criticism, and you know, essentially failed out as a news anchor. Uh, but she learned from those uh those mistakes. She learned from that failure and created you know the Oprah Winfrey show, which was huge and has become uh a massive uh media mogul and uh an entertainer. Um and look, I mean, another way you can look at this is you can go all the way back to somebody like Thomas Edison. Uh you know, I think the the famous story with Edison is when they you know he was trying to create this light bulb and and they they said, well, you know, uh that he can't get anything right. All he's doing is getting it wrong, getting it wrong, getting it wrong. And he said that that uh you know he didn't fail. He just learned uh you know, a hundred ways uh that don't work, right? You know, or a thousand ways that did that didn't work, right? And so that's a real clear example of learning from failure, right? That every time we test a new light bulb, a new you know, structure for this filament in the light bulb, if it doesn't work, and I've learned something, right? I've learned what doesn't work, right? So I can learn what does work um by learning what doesn't work. And so I think that's just probably one of the best examples of learning from failure. And you know, when you when you really learn from as opposed to repeating those mistakes over and over again or giving up, right? Um, when you learn from those mistakes and use those to get better, uh, you have the opportunity to really create something incredible. And then in the case of the light bulb, stuff that we all use every day.
SPEAKER_02When it comes to failure, what psychological factors are at play? Uh, you know, this is what this podcast is all about, it's the science of personality. So are there personality characteristics that help people bounce back and learn from failure more effectively?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, absolutely. And and I think this is really, you know, one of the key messages here is you know, okay, we understand that learning from failure is important. So what what what kind of psychological makeup? Who's more likely to learn from failure? Um, and how can I get better at learning from failure? Well, a few things that really stand out. I mean, obviously resilience, right? Not giving up, it seems really important, right? So, so you know, being able to bounce back. And in in Hogan terms, that's things like higher scores on adjustment, lower scores on excitability. Excitability to much to a really strong degree is really about giving up. It's saying, ah, this doesn't work. Now, that being said, actually, many entrepreneurs actually do score high on excitable, but which is going to bring me to some of my other points later on, because they say, no, this isn't working. Let's give up, let's go on to something else, right? This doesn't work, go on. This doesn't work, go on, right? They're learning from those mistakes and they're quick to go on to something else. But that has to be combined with. And this is where one of the things that we really see. And this is one of those traits that I think gets forgotten a lot when you think about the Hogan personality inventory, Blake, is learning approach. Learning approach is all about this constant need for learning. It's all about wanting to continually learn, continually improve. It's actually, a lot of people don't know this, it's actually the second highest predictor of becoming an executive in an organization, the highest predictor on the HPI being ambition. The second highest predictor is actually learning approach, which is people who just want to continuously improve, continually learning. And that's really critical for being an executive because you know you're gonna make mistakes. You know you're gonna make errors, but can you learn from those mistakes? Can you learn from those errors? Can you improve? Can you get better? And that's what learning approach is all about. And look, this ties in with this other broad literature uh that we we see in psychology today around learning agility, right? So those concepts, this is why organizations are so interested in that, because what you want to do is find people who um who can learn quickly, can can pick up uh new information quickly, but also learn from those mistakes. Go, oh, I made a mistake here. Uh, how can I get better? And, you know, just thinking about psychological concepts related to to learning from mistakes, Blake. I think a big one and one that we talked about, I think, on a live episode of our podcast a while back ago is versatility. Right. Um, individuals who are versatile, well, how do you we talk about well, how do you become versatile? You don't, you're not just nobody's just born versatile, much in the same way nobody's born an amazing uh basketball player, an amazing chess player, or an amazing business leader. Nobody's born with those skills naturally in them. You have to learn them over time. And that's what versatility is all about. It's all about learning which things work and which things don't, and when to apply the right strategies to the right situations, right? Okay, in this strategy, I need to push for more results, or in this situation, I need to push for more results. In this situation, I need to pull people together, bring them together, show them that I care about them and then I can can express empathy. You know, in this circumstance, I need to be strategic. I need to be thinking big picture long term, but in this other circumstance over here, I need to get down to the details. I need to get in there and get my hands dirty. That that you nobody knows when to do that, right? Nobody knows when's the right time to employ any of those kinds of strategies. You only learn that from mistakes. Well, I tried to push everybody for results all the time, and that failed. Didn't fail all the time. Some of the time it worked, but other times it failed. The really successful, really effective leaders are the ones that have learned when it works and when it doesn't. When does this strategy of pushing people too hard, when does that, you know, pushing for more, when is that effective? When does it become ineffective? And that you have to learn through experience. That's that's what what uh what I mean when we talk about learning from failure. And and so you have to go out and try it. You have to say, okay, I'm gonna try this, and I'm gonna try this strategy with my team. And if it doesn't work, that's okay. I'm gonna learn from that and I'm gonna adjust. I'm gonna make an adaptation. And and and then we talked about that with the entrepreneurs. That's what the entrepreneurs do as well. Um, and and so that's what entrepreneurs really have, these really successful ones, is that they they do recognize mistakes, they're quick to point out their own mistakes, and they're quick to learn from those mistakes.
SPEAKER_02Well, Ryan, this has been an awesome conversation. Um, I uh whenever you brought this topic to the table, uh, we we we jumped on it actually pretty quickly because I think we just talked about this a week ago. So um so glad we were able to do this. But I do have one more question before we we we conclude this episode. And that is what advice would you give to those who struggle to deal with or learn from failure?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I think the best thing you can, yeah, I mean they think there's a couple of things you can do. So, number one is I one reason that you struggle that people struggle to learn from failure is because they struggle to fail. We we refuse to put ourselves in positions. We're like that student who wants to raise their hand only when I'm 100% sure that I know the answer. Otherwise, I'm not raising my hand, right? So most of I think most people are like that. We don't want to fail you, we're afraid to fail. We're afraid of how it might make us feel about ourselves, right? It can hurt our ego, right? It makes us feel like we're not very good. And nobody wants to feel like they're not very good, right? So we don't want to do things that will make, you know, that will deflate us, deflate our opinion of ourselves, or hurt our self-esteem. So, so that's one is you have to get comfortable with failure, get comfortable with making mistakes and and and challenge yourself to put yourself out there and possibly make mistakes, possibly get things wrong. Um, so I think that I think that's the first part. And and the second part is you know, the ability to recognize when you made a mistake. And that part I think is is I think the first part trips up more people, but the second part is what becomes really difficult for people with certain personality profiles. So if you, for example, in the Hogan terms, if you're really high on bold, you're really overconfident, you really believe in yourself no matter what, you may be reluctant to recognize that you've made a mistake. And so that's where it can be helpful to have some other peers, some people that you trust that can say, hey, I think we need to take a look at this and determine whether or not it's a mistake, right? And you have to really build a relationship with other people that can tell you when you've made mistakes, right? Because in the sports world, you get immediate feedback, you know if you won or lost or whatever. In the business world, it's easy to come up with scapegoats. It's easy to blame other stuff. Well, this factor, that factor, these other things that impacted our business that we couldn't have predicted. So you need somebody who can keep you grounded, right? If you can't do it yourself, right? So, I mean, obviously, if you can recognize those mistakes in yourself, then that then that's wonderful. But but if you can't, um then I think you need somebody else who can say, hey, we need to consider whether maybe this was a mistake. And these entrepreneurs, that's one of the things that they can be really good at. I think a lot of people see entrepreneurs as overconfident and arrogant. I think in in the overwhelming majority of cases, they're not. Um they're actually very, very aware of their flaws, very aware of their mistakes, very aware that they make mistakes often and ready to correct those. And and I think that's what we can really learn is one, the ability to take some risk, to make some mistakes, and then two, um to be willing to admit that those are mistakes and that it's helped me improve. And again, I go back to the original message of this podcast, which is the only way you can really fail is if you fail to learn. And I think if people can take that message with them, um they'll be more successful.
SPEAKER_02Well, Ryan, I can't think of a better way to wrap this thing up. So uh this was an awesome talk, awesome conversation. And I really think our audience is going to enjoy it.
SPEAKER_03Thanks, Mike.
SPEAKER_02And that does it for the Science of Personality Podcast episode 107. Be sure to join us in two weeks for another fun and informative episode. Cheers, everybody.
SPEAKER_01This has been the Science of Personality Podcast brought to you by Hogan Assessment. You can access all podcast episodes on our website, science of personality.com, or on the streaming service of your choice. See you next time.