How You Learn More from Success Than Failure

I would argue that you can learn to succeed the same way that you learn anything else: From someone who knows how.

You don't learn to speak Mandarin from failing at it.

As someone who has been tagged as an overachiever by my friends (and also that I take things too seriously), as well as many sucessful accomplishments (and some failures), I have captured what I have learned about succeeding and teach it as a 'achievement coach.'

I don't do stuff to brag about it, so I'll list as my biggest personal achievement being the first and only woman to win the single-handed sail boat race from San Francisco to Hawaii on my Santa Cruz 50. My very first single-handed race was just a few short months prior to the Hawaii race.

How did I win a sail boat race where you have to sail the boat all alone? Primarily by learning winning strategy from others. Everyone in the race knew how to sail.

This is the main reason that we applied for this round of Y Combinator. To learn from people who know how to start companies.

Note that I said "primarily." There are many factors involved that I learned along the way and teach as a coach.

I believe that anyone can win with the right strategies and that you don't have to fail to learn them.

I can equate this to aggressive inline skating which I did competitively on the ASA Am circuit for a long time (ala http://www.rolldc.com/ - my home crew).

I would try to land a trick a million times, trying different things or variations or mind-games to conceptualize the balance or approach. None of that shit ever helped.

However, getting it SORTA right, or straight up lacing it one time would allow me to land it 2/4 next tries. Then 3/4 next tries... etc.

The success, mainly the FEELING (in this case physical/balance/positioning) had such a great impact that my brain absorbed the muscle memory much quicker. It then became a feel, and much less of "ok, now jump and spin, try to put my foot here...". I'm sure business could be similar. You can feel success, correct moves, etc, once you've done it before because you know you're on the right track.

For anyone curious and with Windows (.wmv) heres an old skating edit from sophomore year in college. Even though I edited it, there are only a couple of clips of me, I'm the second guy that shows up.

http://filebox.vt.edu/users/skottie/TeamCool/summermid.wmv

Edit: I realize its a little off topic because its not about hacking but I've equated this "feeling" to code as well. You know when you are on the right track (design/progress) because you get that effortless "bliss" feeling.

You clearly learn valuable lessons from both; you just learn from each in different ways.

There are an infinite number of ways to fail, each one having the potential to teach you a valuable life/personal lesson (in addition to the lesson of 'don't do it that way if you want to succeed').

From each success, you learn all the secrets of how to succeed in your endeavor, which could be considered the most important lesson. However, because there are fewer paths to success than to failure in most cases, you may not get the same breadth of lesson-learning as you do with failures.

I believe both are valuable for everyone to experience at some point.

You fail many times before you succeed once. In this case you learn more from failure.

Surely the whole point is to make the most of everything, take every opportunity. Learn everything you can (that's relevant, and sometimes even if not!) all the time. Your aim is to succeed and learn from that, but sometimes you don't have the choice.

If you succeed - learn from it.

If you fail - learn from it.

Try to succeed. (insert gratuitous Yoda quotation)

This might be true for learning mechanical and motion related tasks, which seems to be all they've tested here. For cognitive learning I doubt this is true, however. If I tried to teach someone arithmetic by giving them problems where the answer was always four he wouldn't learn at all. Learning a general theory requires finding out what does work and what doesn't work.

Also, I'm concerned with the correlation and causation here. Someone who naturally bowls well is likely to have strikes and also more likely to finish the game well. I think the real result here is that people who suck at bowling are less consistent, more of the time.

Needs more explanation on the actual mechanism at work. There is a preponderance of evidence of the instructiveness of failure, and we have a fairly good understanding of the underlying mechanism behind that (the dopamine prediction error signal).

See here: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/10/learning_from_mistake...

And here: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/07/over_at_the_times_ben...

Anyone have a link to the original (ungated) paper?

This is misleading, you essentially you learn from positive experience not necessarily success. You learned from the teachers who encouraged than those that didn't.

Sounds eerily familiar to the SvN mantra (37signals). I think the point is that momentum can be exhilarating while even the smallest missteps can really set a company back. Which is why, as a startup you need to positively reinforce your staff, remind people of/tout the little successes and mitigate the failures. Momentum is important for morale (and future successes).