Why we think about failure the wrong way

Why we think about failure the wrong wayWhy we think about failure the wrong wayThink back on the failures youve had in your life.If youre like most people, youll picture the bad outcomes- the business that never took off, the penalty kick you missed, or the job interview you bombed.Poker players, as Annie Duke explains inThinking in Bets, refer to this tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome as resulting.But, as Duke argues, the quality of the input isnt the same as the quality of the output.Follow Ladders on FlipboardFollow Ladders magazines on Flipboard covering Happiness, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, Neuroscience, and moreIts possible for good decisions to lead to bad outcomes. In conditions of uncertainty, outcomes arent completely within your control.An unlucky draw can screw up a perfectly played poker hand. A strong wind can misdirect a beautifully shot soccer ball. A hostile judge or jury can derail a great case.If we engage in resulti ng, we reward bad decisions that lead to good outcomes. Conversely, we change good decisions merely because they produced a bad outcome.We start shaking things up, reorganizing departments, or firing or demoting people. Asone studyshows, National Football League (NFL) coaches change their lineup after a 1-point loss, but dont change it after a 1-point win- even though the difference between the two is negligible.In our own lives, most of us act like American football coaches, treating success and failure as binary outcomes. But we dont live in a binary world.The same decision that produced a failure in one scenario can lead to triumph in others. Failure hovers uncomfortably close to greatness, wrote Paul Watson, the co-discoverer of DNAs double-helix structure.For the vast majority of my life, I ignored the advice Im shelling out here. After a mistake in ablog post, a botched question in apodcast interview, or a slip-up during aspeaking engagement, I would beat myself up.My inner cr itic would roar to life whispering such pleasantries asYoure a failureorYou should have spent more time preparing for that talk.Over time, I learned to pivot from the outputs to the inputs (Im still a work-in-progress). When I fail at something, I first ask myself, What wentwrongwith this failure? If the decisions I made need fixing, I fix them.But I also ask What wentrightwith this failure? I retain the good-quality decisions, even if they produced a failure.Failure has a way of distorting our vision. You often have to take the lenses off- by pivoting your focus from the seemingly awful outcome to the inputs- in order to see clearly.This article first appeared on Ozanvarol.com .You might also enjoyNew neuroscience reveals 4 rituals that will make you happyStrangers know your social class in the first seven words you say, study finds10 lessons from Benjamin Franklins daily schedule that will double your productivityThe worst mistakes you can make in an interview, according to 12 CEO s10 habits of mentally strong people