Many of us were told from an early age that, “you learn from your mistakes”. But is this actually true?
The short answer is “yes” — failure can be a teachable moment. But learning from our mistakes is, in reality, very hard because we don’t like to fail. It doesn’t feel good, so we react to failure in impulsive and emotional ways, like giving up on a task prematurely, telling ourselves we don’t care whether we succeed, or finding fault with the task itself. This is self-protective, according to Hallgeir, a professor of psychology at the Norwegian School of Economics. “Most of us want to think of ourselves as competent”, he says, so when we fail “it poses a serious threat to our self-image”.
Fortunately, there is research to suggest that there are some strategies to help us overcome the emotional barriers around failure. One of them is to adopt a third-person perspective. Instead of asking “Why did I fail?”, we could ask “Why did Sam fail?”, for example. Multiple studies by psychologist Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan show that adopting a third-person perspective helps to soften our negative emotional reactions, allowing us to look at failure more objectively.
A second strategy involves offering advice to others who may be in the same position as us. This strategy led to better levels of motivation and academic success in the test groups — involving both adults and children — that were asked to give advice based on their own failures. Professors Eskreis-Winkler and Duckworth found that the satisfaction of helping others “forces people to engage with their experience and what they have learned”.
The writer Samuel Beckett once said: “fail again, fail better”. But it now seems that we should be saying: “fail again, fail smarter”. Failure is an unavoidable part of life, but by learning to overcome the emotional barriers around it, we may find the road to success is a little easier to navigate (确定方向).
【小题1】What does the underlined word “impulsive” in paragraph 2 probably mean?| A．Uncontrollable. | B．Optimistic. | C．Impressive. | D．Ambitious. |
| A．Failure can be teachable. |
| B．Failure threatens our self-image. |
| C．Failure is an unavoidable part of life. |
| D．Learning from our failures is very hard. |
| A．Failure can be avoided if we learn from it. |
| B．Giving advice to others can help us fail better. |
| C．Only those who succeed can give advice to others. |
| D．A third-person perspective helps us out of the bad feelings of failure. |
| A．Smarter ways to learn from failure. |
| B．How to fail better when we fail again. |
| C．Failure can let us succeed more easily. |
| D．Why we react to failure in emotional ways. |
