Megan McArdle on why it's good to fail

'The Up Side of Down' by Megan McArdle
'The Up Side of Down' by Megan McArdle
Book cover courtesy of publisher

Lots of us are afraid to fail — both in our personal and professional lives. In her new book, "The Up Side of Down," Megan McArdle looks at how our society's structure discourages failure:

These are deep instincts, wired into our very nature. But we make them worse by the way we think about failure. We tend to assume that failure happens because someone, somewhere, did something wrong. In fact, often failure is the result of doing something very right: trying something that you've never done before, maybe something that no one's ever done before...

Since we cannot succeed simply by not failing, we should stop spending so much energy trying to avoid failure or engineer it away. Instead, we should embrace it — smartly. We should encourage people to fail early and often — by making sure that their failures are learning opportunities, not catastrophes. Unfortunately, schools don't teach failure. But maybe they should.

McArdle argues that students are under so much pressure to succeed that they often take easier routes to ensure they don't fail:

America needs more bright, hardworking kids taking on challenging academic work. But it does not need them to learn that success is a formula — or a zero-sum game in which the race goes to the safest. In fact, that's exactly the opposite of what we need — and more important, it's the opposite of what those kids need.

McArdle joins The Daily Circuit to discuss why it's good to fail and how we can learn to identify mistakes early on and turn them into successes.

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