How to Handle Failure Like a Scientist
Your guide to gracefully handle setbacks.
I had 36 months to come up with a world-class discovery or fail graduation. If you aren’t sure what I’m talking about, then you have probably never been into a PhD program. Three to four years long, PhD training is an opportunity for aspiring students to carry cutting edge research and get a doctor’s degree.
The process goes like this:
- Discover something that nobody saw before, literally.
- Find an excellent description of what you found.
- Publish your years of work as a two-page article in a world-class science journal.
As you can imagine, PhD training is a stressful process. You get a countdown to succeed at something specific; failure is not an option. Yet, unless you are fortunate, failed attempts and setbacks will happen during these months.
How do scientists cope with failure during these limited time to success? I’m glad you asked because there are crucial insights for everyone to learn.
The critical point to understand is this: scientists have an excellent mechanism to cope with failure. Whether you are pursuing a business venture, career growth, or participating in some contest, this scientific mechanism can help turn your failures into successes.
Your First Mistake That Scientists Always Avoid
When scientists fail to get the results they want from their experiments, they often say: “Hmm, interesting. Why isn’t this working the way we expect?” Imagine if someone says “the experiment didn’t work because we are stupid.” That would be a rather bizarre reaction from a scientist.
Instead of blaming themselves and taking failure personally, scientists welcome failure with curiosity and decide “let’s change the parameters of the experiment and see how it goes”. They view setbacks not as lack of their worth but as an integral part of their experiments.
When you treat the outcome you want as a lab experiment and your plans to succeed as experimental parameters, you won’t blame yourself when things go wrong. Instead, you will understand that your parameters aren’t ideal for the outcome you want to achieve.
Failing tests doesn’t mean you’re not smart. It means your preparation isn’t optimal. Failing to lose weight doesn’t mean you’re lazy. It means your workout and diet need a thorough revision. Failing to grow your business doesn’t mean you don’t have what it takes. It means the parameters of your growth strategies aren’t the right ones.
Don’t take failure personally. It’s not because of who you are; it’s because you didn’t find the best parameters for your experiment yet.
“Your failures are not you. They’re simply data points that help guide the next experiment.” — James Clear.
This Science-Based Approach Can Turn Your Failure into Success
In their quest for truth, scientists need to know the exact parameters behind the success or failure of each experiment. They record every step necessary to run an experiment, the parameters of each step, and the outcome of each trial — failed or successful.
Follow a scientific approach to deal with failure. Whatever your goal is, record all the steps you take. If you fail to get the wanted outcome, change your parameters. How does your outcome change depending on your configuration? Sometimes, breakthroughs happen by tweaking a single parameter in a previously failed experiment.
Suppose your goal is to grow your email list. You have a website with good traffic, so you want to use it to grab email from visitors. Time to put on your scientist hat and design an experiment to reach your desired outcome.
Desired outcome: Grow my email list.Experiment:To grow my email list, I need a call to action at the top of my website.
After you define your experiment, break it down into concise steps. It will look like this:
Desired outcome: Grow my email list.Experiment:To grow my email list, I put a call to action at the top of my website.Steps:- I write a call to action.
- I put the call to action at the top of my website.
While traffic to your website stays good, your email list is not growing much. After a few weeks, you conclude that your experiment has failed. What is causing your experiment to fail? Is it the format of the call to action, its location, or both?
When met with failure, scientists never change everything at once. Instead, they change one or a few parameters and rerun the experiment. This way, they can isolate the exact cause that led to failure in the first place. Follow the same approach — instead of changing everything at once, change one of the steps you already have.
Desired outcome: Grow my email list.Experiment:To grow my email list fast, I need a call to action at the end of each blog post.Steps:- I made a call to action.
- I put a call to action at the end of each blog post.
When you add your call to action at the end of each blog post, your email list snowballs within a month, your conclusion is now clear: a misplaced call to action will cause failure to grow your email list. With a science-based approach, you turned your failure into success.
The key point is this:
Real progress comes from careful investigation of your failures. Once you understand what’s causing something to go wrong, it becomes easier to tweak the right parameters in the right amount. In the words of Henry Ford:
“The only true failure is the one from which we learn nothing.”
There is a crucial lesson for everyone to learn from the scientific community: success is nothing more than edited failure. Rather than blaming yourself or others, keep a cool head and investigate the exact causes of your setbacks.
If you want to build better habits, learn new skills, or master a craft of any type, the only guarantee, ever, is that you’ll fail at some point. Approach your pursuit as an experiment and treat failure as a scientist would. Be impersonal and document all the steps and parameters of your experiment — your success can be one parameter away.
