A Reflection on “Why You Need to Fail” by Derek Sivers

This was an interesting video to watch with a critical eye.  There is a lot of common sense advice embedded in this video, mixed with a variety of analogies that are at times amusing.  His three main responses to his title are:  if you’re not failing you’re not learning, growth mindset, and experiments.  

The first section covers the ideas of “no pain no gain” and muscle building, where the investment in or cost of learning is measured by the amount of failed or imperfect attempts.  His central ideas here are that mistakes teach better than preparation and doing what you know is fun, but it doesn’t improve you.  

The second section covers what he calls a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset, which have been linked to an educational distinction in students, a mastery oriented student (growth) or a goal oriented student (fixed).  The mastery oriented student completes tasks with the idea of mastering the content or skills while the goal oriented student completes tasks for the sake of a goal, often a grade.  Mastery oriented students are driven by intrinsic motivation, ideal for learning, and goal oriented students are driven by extrinsic motivation, less ideal.  Mr. Sivers discusses how students who are praised for their hard work tend towards a growth mindset and those who are praised for their innate talent tend towards a fixed mindset.  

The third section discusses the value of experiments and how when presented with a choice we have a selection of options to choose from, and argues that because we choose one option we are choosing to experiment with the results of that choice.  He follows this with the reasoning that since everything is an experiment, there are no failures (would be interesting to apply this philosophy to grading).

This video is an excellent one to watch, especially for teachers.  Not only does it make some great points about how to praise students but it’s a great reminder as to why teaching is a reiterative process.  Teachers can be effective and still “fail”, but that’s not the point, the point is that we learn from each failure  and move on to improving it or finding something better.

Which is a great point to segue into my disagreements with the video.  First and foremost his use of the word “fail.”  The word has a finality built into its meaning that does an injustice to the important topic being discussed in the video.  Failure is an absolute state, either one has failed or one has not, and as I mentioned above one can try at the same thing and improve it every single time.  This does not make each and every non-optimal attempt a failure, because they are not absolute states of failure.  A more accurate title would be “Why You Need to Make Mistakes.”  Mistakes are the key, and one can make mistakes without failing, one can learn from mistakes and seek to eliminate them, which is an important part of the experimental process he mentions.  Experimentation, above all else, is an iterative process and a key component of effective teaching.  While failure certainly includes mistakes, it is not a necessary part of learning, and can be very detrimental.  Instead it serves one better to aim to do as well as possible and make note of mistakes, and then seek to fix them.