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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Matthew Syed
Read between
August 29 - October 15, 2019
A progressive attitude to failure turns out to be a cornerstone of success for any institution.
Only by redefining failure will we unleash progress, creativity and resilience.
‘Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.’
Those with the easy task gave accurate estimates; those with the tough task underestimated the time by as much as 40 per cent.
It is about creating systems and cultures that enable organisations to learn from errors, rather than being threatened by them.
Failure is rich in learning opportunities for a simple reason: in many of its guises, it represents a violation of expectation.
It is showing us that the world is in some sense different from the way we imagined it to be.
effect, practice is about harnessing the benefits of learning from failure while reducing its cost.
Knowledge does not progress merely by gathering confirmatory data, but by looking for contradictory data.
The intuitions of nurses and chess players are constantly checked and challenged by their errors. They are forced to adapt, to improve, to restructure their judgements. This is a hallmark of what is called deliberate practice.
Without access to the ‘error signal’, one could spend years in training or in a profession without improving at all.
Errors can be thought of as the gap between what we hoped would happen, and what actually did happen.
So that others may learn, and even more may live.
When we are confronted with evidence that challenges our deeply held beliefs we are more likely to reframe the evidence than we are to alter our beliefs. We simply invent new reasons, new justifications, new explanations. Sometimes we ignore the evidence altogether.
‘For some Americans, their desire to support the war may be leading them to screen out information that weapons of mass destruction have not been found. Given the intensive news coverage and high levels of public attention to the topic, this level of misinformation [is remarkable].’
‘Cognitive dissonance’ is the term Festinger coined to describe the inner tension we feel when, among other things, our beliefs are challenged by evidence.
From reading exactly the same material, the two groups moved even further apart in their views. They had each reframed the evidence to fit in with their pre-existing beliefs.
Cognitive dissonance occurs when mistakes are too threatening to admit to, so they are reframed or ignored. This can be thought of as the internal fear of failure: how we struggle to admit mistakes to ourselves.
they make judicious use of tests, challenge their own assumptions, and wield the lessons to guide strategy. It is a mix of top-down reasoning (as per the mathematicians) and bottom-up iteration (as per the biologists); the fusing of the knowledge they already have with the knowledge that can be gained by revealing its inevitable flaws.
the power of the narrative fallacy. We are so eager to impose patterns upon what we see, so hardwired to provide explanations, that we are capable of ‘explaining’ opposite outcomes with the same cause without noticing the inconsistency.
Success is not just dependent on before-the-event reasoning, it is also about after-the-trigger adaptation.
After all, how can you learn from failure if you are not sure you have actually failed?
‘The approach comes from the idea that if you break down a big goal into small parts, and then improve on each of them, you will deliver a huge increase when you put them all together.’
The world is too complex to figure everything out from your armchair. The only way to be sure is to go out and test your ideas and programmes, and to realise that you will often be wrong. But that is not a bad thing. It leads to progress.
As of 2010, the company was carrying out 12,000 RCTs every year.
‘People think that if you have a huge appetite, then you’ll be better at it,’ he said. ‘But, actually, it’s how you confront the food that is brought to you.’
Creativity is, in many respects, a response.
failure sparks creativity into life, the moment of insight invariably emerges from the attempt to bridge the problem with previously unconnected ideas or technologies.
The creative leap may have been a crucial and precious thing, but it was only the start of the creative process.
‘If insight is about the big picture, development is about the small picture.
This is not just the discipline to iterate a creative idea into a rigorous solution; it is also the discipline to get the manufacturing process perfect, the supply lines faultless, delivery seamless.fn43
‘The great task, rarely achieved, is to blend creative intensity with relentless discipline so as to amplify the creativity rather than destroy it,’
blame is, in many respects, a subversion of the narrative fallacy: an oversimplification driven by biases in the human brain.
The problem is often not a lack of focus, it is a consequence of complexity. Increasing punishment, in this context, doesn’t reduce mistakes, it reduces openness.
This may sound like wishful thinking, but it indicates a direction of travel.
Karl Popper put it: ‘True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.’
Grit, then, is strongly related to the Growth Mindset; it is about the way we conceptualise success and failure.
In effect, the mistaken idea that success is an instant phenomenon destroys resilience.
‘Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently,’
Japanese citizens demonstrated the highest fear of failure. Americans, meanwhile, displayed one of the lowest levels.7
