The Up Side of Down Quotes

“the people who dislike challenges think that talent is a fixed thing that you’re either born with or not. The people who relish them think that it’s something you can nourish by doing stuff you’re not good at.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“Learning to fail well means learning to understand your mistakes, because unless you know what went wrong, you may do the wrong things to correct it.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“Most of all, learning to fail well means overcoming our natural instincts to blame someone—maybe ourselves—whenever something goes wrong.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“Work finally begins,” says Alain de Botton, “when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“a European executive who works for a company that has failed is an executive who no longer has a career. In America, by contrast, having tried (and failed) to start your own company is often a résumé booster—particularly in the fertile fields of Silicon Valley. It marks you as a risk taker, a self-starter, someone who is not afraid to shoulder a whole lot of responsibility. And the (correct) assumption is that in your failure, you’ve learned a lot of valuable lessons that your new employer will benefit from. On the two continents, the exact same set of circumstances signal wildly different things: in Europe, that you are irresponsible, and perhaps too lazy and incompetent to run a business, in America, that you are a risk taker and a visionary.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“groupidity”: doing something stupid because other people around you seem to think it’s safe.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“If you want to minimize the risk of catastrophe, you focus on the process much more than the outcome.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“They’d help kids overcome their natural fear of failure, because failure is often the best—and sometimes the only—way to learn.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“Dweck encourages parents and teachers to praise children for their effort, rather than their intelligence, talent, or looks.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“The metaphor for our age is the disappearance of high monkey bars from playgrounds across the country. We have made it impossible for children to fall very far—and in so doing, we have robbed them of the joys of climbing high.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“Somehow, taking risks in groups makes us more, not less, likely to make dumb gambles that give us some remote hope of maintaining the status quo. We look around at all the other people strapped into their seats and say, “Never mind the smell of smoke.” While you’d hope that adding more people would make it more likely that someone would state the obvious, in truth, it often just gives our play-acting a larger and more convincing cast.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“If we want an educated population, a skilled workforce, an innovative society, then we will have to work just as hard as he did to persuade people that the pain of failure is like a blister in tennis—a sign that you are trying hard enough to improve.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“Multiple iterations,” Skillman told the audience, “almost always beats single-minded focus around a single idea.” The people who were planning weren’t learning. The people who were trying and failing were.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“To see what is in front of your face,” wrote George Orwell, “is a constant struggle.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“Fundamentally, people are herd animals. We band together for safety.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“Mistakes are most likely to be identified when they lead to a failure.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“he thinks that failure isn’t just a way to learn faster: it’s the only way to learn at all.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“Most of us fear failure more than almost anything else.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“Most of the time you can get away with launching a terrible product, or with not washing your hands, but one time in a thousand, you will kill a person, or a company.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“By contrast, a modern person lives surrounded by strangers who are doing things they may not understand. We cannot rely on our instincts and our relationships to keep society working. So it’s more important than ever to make sure that we get the rules right. If we want our economy to grow, it means looking for ways to support experimental risk-taking by trading a little more than we may instinctively be comfortable with. It means offering big payoffs to those who are willing to take big risks but also making sure that the unlucky don’t starve. In short, it means accepting that a high degree of unpredictability goes with the hunting ground.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“The secret to catching your mistakes quickly is simple: treat outside information as if it were inside information. When someone tells you you’re off track, don’t look for reasons why they may be wrong; listen for reasons why they might be right.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“The reason we struggle with insecurity,” says Pastor Steven Furtick, “is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“fear of being unmasked as the incompetent you “really” are is so common that it actually has a clinical name: impostor syndrome.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“object is to take lots of small, manageable risks, because that, he says, is the only way to figure out what really works.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“We have made it impossible for children to fall very far—and in so doing, we have robbed them of the joys of climbing high.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“If they’re forced into a challenge they don’t feel prepared for, they may even engage in what psychologists call “self-handicapping”: deliberately doing things that will hamper their performance in order to give themselves an excuse for not doing well. Self-handicapping can be fairly spectacular: in one study, men deliberately chose performance-inhibiting drugs when facing a task they didn’t expect to do well on.7 “Instead of studying,” writes the psychologist Edward Hirt, “a student goes to a movie the night before an exam. If he performs poorly, he can attribute his failure to a lack of studying rather than to a lack of ability or intelligence. On the other hand, if he does well on the exam, he may conclude that he has exceptional ability, because he was able to perform well without studying.”8 Writers who don’t produce copy—or leave it so long that they couldn’t possibly produce something good—are giving themselves the perfect excuse for not succeeding. “Work finally begins,” says Alain de Botton, “when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.” For people with an extremely fixed mind-set, that tipping point quite often never happens. They fear nothing so much as finding out that they never had what it takes.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“Writers who don’t produce copy—or leave it so long that they couldn’t possibly produce something good—are giving themselves the perfect excuse for not succeeding.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“If they’re forced into a challenge they don’t feel prepared for, they may even engage in what psychologists call “self-handicapping”: deliberately doing things that will hamper their performance in order to give themselves an excuse for not doing well.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“The alternative to villains who have done something wrong is a universe where bad things sometimes happen to people who don’t deserve them.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“Like most people, I couldn't let go of the money we'd wasted. That's why so many people eat awful meals, watch horrible movies, read terrible books, and suffer through dreadful relationships. It's why I am far from the only woman who wasted her early thirties on a relationship that wasn't going anywhere. The psychological cost of conceding that you've made a huge mistake--worse, a mistake you can't fix--is too great. So you waste even more money, or time, or effort trying to somehow salvage what you've lost.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success