Black Box Thinking: Growth Mindset and the Secrets of High Performance

by Matthew Syed

It sounds simple, doesn’t it? Learning from failure has the status of a cliché. But it turns out that, for reasons both prosaic and profound, a failure to learn from mistakes has been one of the single greatest obstacles to human progress.

Studies have shown that we are often so worried about failure that we create vague goals, so that nobody can point the finger when we don’t achieve them.

As Eleanor Roosevelt put it: ‘Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.’

In each case the investigators realised that crews were losing their perception of time. Attention, it turns out, is a scarce resource: if you focus on one thing, you will lose awareness of other things.

It is by testing our ideas, subjecting them to failure, that we set the stage for growth.

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.

This reveals a subtle difference between external and internal deception. A deliberate deception (misleading one’s colleagues, or a patient, or a boss) has at least one clear benefit. The person doing the deceiving will, by definition, recognise the deceit and will inwardly acknowledge the failure. Perhaps he will amend the way he does his job to avoid such a failure in the future. Self-justification is more insidious. Lying to oneself destroys the very possibility of learning. How can one learn from failure if one has convinced oneself – through the endlessly subtle means of self-justification, narrative manipulation, and the wider psychological arsenal of dissonance-reduction – that a failure didn’t actually occur?

It hints at the suspicion that the intellectual energy of some of the world’s most formidable thinkers is directed, not at creating new, richer, more explanatory theories, but at coming up with ever-more tortuous rationalisations as to why they were right all along.

It is those who are the most publicly associated with their predictions, whose livelihoods and egos are bound up with their expertise, who are most likely to reframe their mistakes – and who are thus the least likely to learn from them.