Failure: Your Inevitable Stepping-Stone to Success
“When we give ourselves permission to fail, we, at the same time, give ourselves permission to excel.” ― Eloise Ristad
I’d like to consider myself a science-minded, rational person who can rise above the broad generalizations described in horoscopes. However, even I have to admit that when you look up the description for Virgo, my zodiac sign, I fit the outline to a T. “Worrier, perfectionist, prone to self-criticism.” That’s pretty much as accurate as it gets, and needless to say does not set me up well for dealing with inevitable failures that come with scientific work.
As unique as I’d like to believe I am, these traits are not exclusively found in individuals born between August 23 and September 22; in my immediate circle, I see perfectionism and fear of failure echoed throughout the experiences of students and young career scientists. We are scared that if we make a mistake our obvious incompetency as researchers will be found out and disqualify us from a scientific career. Furthermore, our supervisor may be upset with us because we may have “wasted” valuable time or expensive resources, amplifying the sense of shame.
For much of my graduate school career, I fell into the trap of constant self-doubt and worry driven by my intense fear of failure. I felt like any mistake made in the lab was immediate evidence of my innate inadequacy, and a cloud of anxiety and shame loomed above me every time I did not accomplish a task or deliver a lecture perfectly. Learning to deal with failure has been one of the hardest lessons of my scientific training. I’ve had to make a conscious effort to learn from my mistakes. However, embracing failure as part of a comprehensive learning process has made the inevitable mistakes seem less like a spotlight on my deficiency and more as an investment in my future success. If I learn from what I did “wrong” in the moment, I can be aware of future mistakes and become a better scientist. It’s not about being perfect and never failing, but about learning from failure so that you can fail in different, more unique ways that you will then continue to learn from.
While welcoming failure is something I am very much working on, I have identified a few key strategies for dealing with failure and rejection in a productive way. Hopefully you can add some of these to your resiliency toolbox and learn to embrace failure as an invaluable teacher and inevitable stepping stone to your future success!
When you do “fail,” recognize why and make a clear learning moment out of the event. This was the first technique I started using to re-define my failures. I used to respond to failure by burying my head in the sand and anxious telling myself “I’ll never make that dumb of a mistake again!” This wasn’t at all helpful to the future me, as I often did end up repeating the exact same error and feeling even worse about myself. It is infinitely more productive to face your mistakes head on, forgive yourself for messing up, and identify the reasons for the error and how you can avoid them in the future.
Get out of your head and think about the advice you would give to a close friend if they had made the mistake or “failed” in the way you did. Imagine that your best friend came to you, crying, and explained that they had mislabeled some tubes in the lab and now the samples were mixed up. Would you tell them how stupid they are to have made such a novice mistake? I hope not! However, that’s almost always what we are telling ourselves in our own heads. It helps to spend a moment reflecting on how you would console your friend if they were in your shoes. Sometimes, it helps to literally write out a dialog and compare what you are telling yourself to the advice you would give them to illuminate your inner narrative.
Re-evaluate how you respond to success. There’s no better feeling for an academic scientist than getting a grant or having a paper accepted into a top-tier journal (or honestly, any journal!), so when it happens celebration is mandatory! However, if your success is always defined as publishing or securing a grant, you are going to be disappointed and feel like you’re failing on 99% of your working days. Obviously publishing and getting grants is very important for the livelihood of an academic, but re-defining success as you work towards these things can make the process much more enjoyable and rewarding. If big successes are the ONLY thing you allow yourself to find joy in and celebrate, failures will only seem only like impediments. I try to celebrate small accomplishments – like a successful PCR reaction or completing a paragraph on a manuscript – so that the big ones aren’t the only thing I look forward to. It’s even better when you can define success as learning from an activity instead of the outcome. That way, you can give yourself a small mental congrats whenever you learn something new, regardless of ascribed success or failure!
Focus on the way you do things, not the outcome. This one ticks all my perfectionist boxes while keeping me focused on the journey, not the destination. If I have an experiment to do with a clearly desired outcome (like an assay that will validate the really cool, novel results of a previous test) I focus on doing the absolute best job of conducting the experiment that I can. If the outcome is disappointing, I can still congratulate myself for a well-run experiment and feel more confident in the results.
Turn it around: imagine that it is 5 years in the future, and looking back you realize that the failure actually contributed significantly to one of your largest successes. In 1928, Alexander Fleming sloppily plated some bacteria out before leaving the lab for a 2 week vacation. When he returned, his contaminated plates harbored a drug that has since saved an estimated 200 million lives. Not everyone’s mistakes can be this impactful, but it can be really useful to reframe your “failure” in terms of helping you achieve eventual success. Current failures may help prevent you from repeating the same mistakes in the future, or they may lead to unanticipated new discoveries – but only if you have an open enough mind to see them that way!
If you get negative feedback on a manuscript draft or essay, reframe the comments and realize that the reviewers are there to help you communicate your point in a more effective way. When I got the reviewer comments back on my very first submitted manuscript, I was devastated. The fact that they found multiple negative aspects of a draft I had poured my soul into was heartbreaking. In an unusually compassionate moment, my advisor gave me some of the best science writing advice that I’ve received: Any negative comments by reviewers are not personal slights on your abilities or vision, but just show where you haven’t marketed your ideas to them in the most effective way. You simply need to re-work your presentation in order to better convey the great findings of your work or the exciting discoveries you’ll make when you receive funding. Reframing criticism as a communication failure totally changed my perspective because it no longer means they’re criticizing me and my work as a scientist, but more that they didn’t understand what I was trying to convey.
Failure gives you the opportunity to practice and strengthen resilience. This is probably my most cliche and annoying piece of advice, but one of the most important. Being a scientist is all about flexibility and grit, about moving forward when experiments or analyses don’t work out the way you hoped. I think that this is the most defining factor of any scientific career, and it was pivotal to my own journey to understand that perfection does not equal success. Instead, achievement is measured in how you engage with, learn from, and move past setbacks and perceived failures.
More Resources on the Topic:
Literature Review
Exploring why we learn from productive failure: Insights from the cognitive and learning sciences https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10459-020-10013-y
Strategies for Learning from Failure https://thriving.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Strategies%20for%20Learning%20from%20Failure%20(Worline%20Lecture).pdf
Internality and the internalization of failure: Evidence from a novel task https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8284820/
Easy Reads
Why learning from failure is your key to success https://www.betterup.com/blog/learning-from-failure
The smart way to learn from failure https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20221019-the-smart-way-to-learn-from-failure
Something to Watch
Failure Is Part of Success: Eduardo Zanatta at TEDxBYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bujIb_sQZvQ
How to Face Failure in Academics: Professor Errol D’Souza at TEDxYouth@JGIS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOaIPt33Eas
Rethinking failure: Barbara Corcoran at TEDxBarnardCollege https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU1DI8HsYAg
About the author: Maddie Krieger is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Oregon Health and Science University. Her work combines wet lab and computational approaches to investigate the polymicrobial nature of oral diseases. She loves talking to other current or aspiring scientists about non-traditional STEM education and career paths. Maddie has been the Communications Chair of WIS since April 2022, and is passionate about science equality and bringing issues of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion to the forefront of discussions around STEM career paths and education. In addition to being a scientist, Maddie is an avid runner, equestrian, reader, and fan of deserts and reality TV.
