Thinking more positively about failure

Annie Vernon is a two-time world champion and Olympic silver medallist rower. She competed for Team GB at the Beijing 2008 and London 2012 Olympic Games. She has subsequently written a book about mindset in elite sports, Mind Games, which won the 2020 British Sport Book Awards.

Sport is about success, right? Sport is defined by celebrating, raising the trophy, flying the national flag.

If you thought the answer was 'yes', unfortunately, you're wrong. It's about failure. Specifically, learning from failure. Because as researchers and practitioners, failure is part of your life at a micro level (testing hypotheses that turn out to be wrong, interventions which don't pan out as expected) and a macro level (you will apply for far more jobs than you will get; ditto funding, and papers for review). And that means we need to start thinking more positively about failure. It's not something to fear.

Failure is brutal. In sports, it's particularly brutal. Take the Euro 2024 football tournament. 364 players will arrive in Germany, dreaming of glory. One team will lift the trophy. Everyone else will have failed. Hundreds of thousands of people will be sprinters.

One man and one woman will win the 100m gold medal in Paris this summer. There isn't another job to go for, or contract to win. There's no 'other' Euros or Olympics to try your hand at.

As an athlete, you get a tiny window to get it right. Six minutes every four years you have the opportunity to win an Olympic medal in my sport of rowing, or 90 minutes every four years to win the Euros. You may only get one chance in your whole lifetime to 'do it'. And you'll never be significantly better or worse than your opposition. But there has to be a margin of victory. A super-over, a penalty shootout, or a photo finish is how major titles are often decided. The margins are tiny, but the way you feel about yourself either side of that line is the width of a continent.

Most sporting careers aren't defined by wins, or fairy tale endings, though. Sport tells us as much about how to manage setbacks as it does how to achieve success. The psychology of failure and setbacks is something that, in sport, you have to master. Because it's part of your day-to-day. If you don't like losing, you won't get very far in sport. You have to learn to be friends with failure.

How can find the joy in failure? And why should we?

First of all, it focuses your mind. In rowing, we might say that 'basics win races', and if you experience setbacks and adversity, it focuses your mind on what's important: the basics. You learn to trim things down and keep your approach simple.

It also levels the playing field. Perhaps, in your team, there are varying degrees of experience and previous success. When you're on a winning streak, perhaps egos get in the way. If you've just failed, then everyone is down at the same levels, egos get put away, and we are all equal. Everyone's ideas are on the table and we can start learning.

And when this happens, it's an opportunity to try something completely new. An opportunity to think strategically, and strip back and analyse what actually happened. It's an opportunity to take responsibility. We learn far, far more from defeat than victory. Fundamentally it's an opportunity to get better.

How do we learn to relish failure?

One way is by developing a growth mindset. It's a term widely used in education and sport, and more and more in business, based on the work of Professor Carol Dweck and over 30 years of research. One of her famous studies included 400 5th-grade students (10- to 11-year-olds) and involved giving them a simple test.

Afterwards, each student was given six words of praise. Half were praised for intelligence: 'Wow, you must be really clever!' The other half were praised for effort: 'Wow, you must be hard working!' Dweck was seeking to test whether these simple words, with their subtly different emphases, could make a difference to the student's mindsets and to their performance.

The results were remarkable.

After the first test, the students were given a choice of whether to take a hard or an easy test. 40 per cent of the students praised for intelligence chose the easy test – they did not want to risk losing their 'clever' label. But 90 per cent of the effort-praised group chose the tougher test – they wanted to prove just how hard-working they were.

Then, the experiment came full circle, giving the students a chance to take a test of equal difficulty to the first test. The group praised for intelligence showed a 20 per cent decline in performance compared with the first test, even though it was no harder. But the effort-praised group increased their score by 30 per cent. Being challenged had actually spurred them on.

Many people believe that talent is a fixed quality and all these differences turned on the difference in six simple words spoken after the very first test. 'These were some of the clearest findings I've seen,' Dweck said. 'Praising children's intelligence harms motivation and it harms performance.'

The worst thing we can do is to fear failure: it's ok to fail in the pursuit of something you care about! A batter in cricket shouldn't fear getting out; a team shouldn't fear losing a major final. Walk towards failure; it shapes you, and you will always learn more about yourself from a failure than a success. It's brutal but it's part of life.

The final word on this belongs to Henry Ford, the US car manufacturing pioneer: 'Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently'. And here lies the key. We don't fail repeatedly: finding the joy in failure is about learning and improving – beginning again more intelligently.

From Professor Marcus Munafo, Associate Editor for Research:

Annie and I met when we were both on the GB Under-23 Rowing Team – she as an athlete, myself as a coach. As Annie says, there are lessons we can learn from elite sports and apply in other contexts – in our case, academic research.

Most studies don't work. P-values remain stubbornly large, null hypotheses refuse to be rejected. That, at least, has been my experience over three decades of doing research. And yet, if you look at the published literature everything seems to work perfectly. One study by Daniele Fanelli estimated that over 90 per cent of psychology studies claim to have found what they were looking for all along. As the anagrammatic 'Arina K. Bones' wrote: scientific hypothesising is more accurate than other forms of precognition.

Of course, that impression of perfection is the result of a combination (largely) of publication bias – authors choosing to write up only the studies that 'worked' (see Annie Franco and others, [PDF] 'Publication bias in the social sciences: Unlocking the file drawer') – and a certain amount of questionable research practices, in particular HARKing (Hypothesising After the Results are Known). And it's a particularly toxic feature of the research environment because it gives the impression – particularly, perhaps, to early career researchers – that everyone else is doing brilliant work; just not us.

That failure to embrace and acknowledge failure and openly discuss it means that we only ever get to see people's numerator – their successes. The only denominator we know with confidence is our own. So it looks to us that only a fraction of the grants we submit get funded, for example, whereas we see the success of others all around us. In other words, our failure to acknowledge failure can make us feel like failures. How can we foster a more healthy approach to this inherent feature of academia?

There are several examples, many of which amount to leading by example. Aidan Horner, now a professor at the University of York, published his Negative CV in 2014 whilst still a postdoc, to illustrate just how common failure and rejection is as an early career researcher. And Olivia Maynard did something similar when she received an ESRC New Investigator Award, making the point that this success came on the back of several rejections (and lessons learned through that process).

For my own part, I remember the genuine surprise in a room of early career researchers when I said I still have most of my papers rejected, most grants rejected – at more or less the same rate as throughout my career. My success (such as it is) is not the result of the absence of failure; it is because of it. I have learned from setbacks, and see them as part of the job. As Rudyard Kipling said in If, we need to meet success and failure, and treat both as impostors.

In other words, failures don't mean you did everything wrong, and success didn't mean you did everything right. (As an aside, the Dweck research Annie mentions has been influential, and successful for her, but it's fair to say that it's contested and perhaps doesn't align with what everyone thinks success in research is, or should be. This speaks to what is becoming a recurring theme in these pages – current incentive structures in academia.) 

The grant that was funded wasn't perfect. Normalising failure and holding success lightly helps to foster a culture of continuous reflection and improvement. Whether we succeed or fail, we should be asking: How could we have done this better? What worked, and what would we do differently next time?

Photo: GBR women's quad taste defeat in a World Cup race in 2008, prior to the Olympic Games. L-R Katherine Grainger, Frances Houghton, Debbie Flood, Annie Vernon