Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

by Matthew Syed

the explanation for success hinges, in powerful and often counterintuitive ways, on how we react to failure.

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.

Failure is rich in learning opportunities for a simple reason: in many of its guises, it represents a violation of expectation.6 It is showing us that the world is in some sense different from the way we imagined it to be.

practice is about harnessing the benefits of learning from failure while reducing its cost.

But even if we practice diligently, we will still endure real-world failure from time to time. And it is often in these circumstances, when failure is most threatening to our ego, that we need to learn most of all. Practice is not a substitute for learning from real-world failure; it is complementary to it. They are, in many ways, two sides of the same coin.