In business circles, failure has never been more popular.
“Does Failure Lead to Success?” asks a story on Forbes.com.
“Want to Succeed? Get Used to Failure,” trumpets an article for Inc.com.
“Failure Is The Only Option, If Success Is the End Goal,” proclaims a piece at FastCompany.com.
This recent rash of stories touting the benefits of failure may lead some to ask: Is failure really all it’s cracked up to be? Should corporate HR departments and boards looking to inject the best hires into their organization’s C-suite demand that potential hires show evidence of failure? Should job seekers headline their resumes with their top failures?
The question, put more simply, is this: Is past failure a sign of future success? The answer is that past performance—whether positive or negative—is the best predictor of future performance.
Often, the most ambitious, driven and talented performers experience a failure or two early in life, which teaches key lessons that help them succeed in the future. That is, provided they possess a particular trait.
Take Steve Jobs’ work at NeXT, the tech hardware he started after being ousted from Apple during the 1980s. In the long run, the company’s clunky hardware never caught on—something that many consider a failure in Jobs’ career, especially relative to the blockbuster success of Apple and Pixar.
But in 1997, Apple purchased NeXT, paving the way for Jobs’ return to Apple. Did Jobs’ failure to make a popular product at NeXT spell success for him in the future? Maybe.
New research conducted by thinkers such as the University of Pennsylvania’s Angela Duckworth shows that there’s an almost imperceptible quality that successful people possess. It’s not the ability to fail, but the ability to endure—and learn from—failure. It’s a quality she calls grit: “passion and perseverance for very long term goals,” as she defines it.
Duckworth and a team of researchers studied who was most likely to succeed in varied endeavors, from cadets at the nation’s top military academy to participants in the National Spelling Bee to first-year teachers in tough urban schools.
Her findings?
“[T]alented individuals, for whom learning and advancement come easily, have fewer opportunities (or, more aptly, necessities) to develop a resilient approach to failure and setbacks.”
Grit, on the other hand, allows less-talented individuals to develop a kind of failure-resistance.
Jobs, by all accounts, was endlessly creative and innovative. But it also seems he possessed grit.
(Want to find out your grit score? Take Duckworth’s assessment here.)
Contrary to what’s become de rigueur wisdom, failure doesn’t lead to success. But its presence in a leader’s professional past—if dealt with and learned from—could be evidence of a deeper, less measurable quality that all companies should want in a potential hire: grit—the ability to stay with a problem longer than others.
Past failures may not indicate future success. The possession of grit—the ability to endure failure and press on—likely does.
