“In a very different study with similar conclusions, my colleagues Bradley “Brad” Staats and Francesca Gino—then professors at the University of North Carolina—studied how seventy-one surgeons learned from failure versus success on a total of 6,516 cardiac surgeries in ten years. The surgeons learned more from their own successes than from their own failures, but learned more from others’ failures than from others’ successes. This effect—again ego protecting—was less pronounced if a surgeon had a history of personal success. Failures presumably stung less sharply with that cushion of prior success.”