Bring Back Failure
Reprogramming via chemistry, rockets, and rock climbing
Have you heard the saying, “A” students end up working for “B” students? Why do so many “gifted” students underperform once they enter the real world? This phenomena common enough to have have an actual name in psychiatric research - Gifted Child Syndrome. To jump to the answer, gifted children are often praised for being smart and also have little difficulty doing the school tasks. They sail easily through academia and are rewarded for doing so. But then the real world shows up and suddenly the correct answer is much trickier to find. This leads to a kind of mental paralysis where the once star student becomes afraid of making the wrong choice, so they avoid situations outside of their comfort zone. This leads to them receiving a new label - “not living up to their potential”. The downward spiral has begun.
Believe it or not, I wasn’t a gifted student in school. Yes, I was smart until math entered the picture. It just seemed so…mathy. Algebra was okay, but trig and calculus were struggles. This made all the difference later on. Not understanding something meant I had to work harder, not hide from it.
Chemistry & Failure & Video Games
I used to think being a chemist broke your fear of failure. When I’m formulating something it can take 30 to 300 tries to create a product with the proper efficacy, price, and safety. That was weeks of failure after failure until the goal was reached. Failure, and learning why it failed, was a key part of being a chemist. Yet in the 2010s I noticed a change in the new, young employees I was mentoring. Their resumes were stellar, though all academic. They were terrified of failing and getting them to “just try it” was an exercise in frustration for me and them. It took a lot of work to reprogram their minds that failure wasn’t just okay, but a requirement of the job.
In a discussion of this issue with other GenX coworkers, one brought up an interesting point - video games. Us GenXers used to play in arcades where a quarter got you three lives in a game, but through experimenting in our gameplay, we’d eventually figure out how to make those lives last a long time or added extra lives to our avatar. The video games of these younger chemists could be saved and restarted at any point. This did allow for experimentation but the pressure behind it was different than when you were blowing through your lunch money.
Rockets & Failure
Which public figure is doing the most to show the value of failure? Elon Musk, and I love him for that. Yes, I know appreciating him will tick off a lot of people but I stand by it.
