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  • Were often afraid of failure.

  • We see it as something to be avoided at all costs.

  • But what if I told you that it’s okay to fail?

  • In fact, what if I told you it’s actually good to fail from time to time?

  • Dr. Jubbal MedSchoolInsiders.com.

  • Our perception of failure has changed greatly throughout history.

  • In Ancient Greece, failure was not seen as negative, but rather as an unavoidable part of life.

  • A common theme among many of the Great Greek Tragedies, such as Oedipus Rex and the Odyssey, is that sometimes bad things can happen to good people,

  • so we should remain sympathetic and understanding to those confronting failure.

  • If we fast forward to the time of Napoleon in France, however, he was a strong believer in meritocracy.

  • He believed that opportunities should be available to the talented rather than the privileged.

  • As such, failure during that time was seen as reflective of one’s lack of ability or talent.

  • Nowadays, the lines are more blurred.

  • Most people tend to view failure as a negativesomething to be avoided whenever possible.

  • That being said, there are some groups that actually invite failure, and instead view it as something to be celebrated.

  • The interesting thing is that these same groups tend to include some of the most successful people in the world.

  • It may sound paradoxical; however, it actually makes a lot of sense when you peel back the curtain.

  • Here’s why failure can actually be a good thing and how you can use failure to become the best version of yourself.

  • To understand why failure is important, let’s start with the biology of failure and how it relates to building healthy habits.

  • Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays a role in our mood, motivation, time perception, and mindset.

  • Due to these roles, it also colors our perception of success and failure.

  • If our dopamine levels are high, we will generally feel good and highly motivated; however, when they are low we often feel bad and unmotivated.

  • As a result, success is often associated with high levels of dopamine and failure with low levels of dopamine; however, this doesn’t tell the full story.

  • Dopamine levels fluctuate throughout the day.

  • We have a baseline dopamine level that peaks, both positively and negatively, depending on our behavior.

  • How good we feel isn’t a measure of how much dopamine we have, but rather the change in our dopamine levels from baseline.

  • The higher the peak is above or trough is below our baseline, the better or worse we feel.

  • Therefore, the two factors that influence our mood and motivation are our baseline dopamine and our recent dopamine peaks.

  • When you accomplish something positive, your body releases high levels of dopamine and you feel good; however, you also deplete most of your readily accessible dopamine.

  • This causes you to actually dip below baseline for a while afterward as you don’t have more dopamine readily available.

  • As a result, if you keep trying to chase those wins and get those peaks in your dopamine, over time your baseline dopamine levels become lower and lower.

  • When this occurs, not only do you feel worse on average, but it takes bigger and bigger wins to peak your dopamine levels.

  • As such, the more you repeatedly succeed at something, the less enjoyment you get out of it.

  • Here’s an example.

  • Let’s say youre playing a video game that youre really good at.

  • If you win every single time you play, winning eventually stops being enjoyable. The challenge is gone.

  • Conversely, if you are really bad at that game and you lose every single time, it won’t be very enjoyable either.

  • The way to get around this is to have an intermittent reward pattern.

  • To find long-term enjoyment in an activity, you have to "win" sometimes but you also have to "lose" sometimes.

  • This is the same reason that gambling is so addictive.

  • Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, but neither one happens every time.

  • As a result, you are able to peak your dopamine levels without decreasing your baseline.

  • These same intermittent reward patterns don’t always have to be negative, however.

  • By understanding how your dopamine signaling is influenced by success and failure, you can use it to reinforce good habits.

  • As we mentioned previously, dopamine is involved in time perception.

  • If were enjoying something, time seems to fly by; if we aren’t, time seems to drag on.

  • But there’s another component to this.

  • If youre focusing on the end goal instead of the process, the process itself often becomes more challenging.

  • This is best demonstrated by a classic 1973 study that looked at intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation in children.

  • The researchers theorized that if you start doing something that you genuinely enjoy for some sort of reward, the activity itself can become less enjoyable.

  • To test this hypothesis, they took a group of children who genuinely enjoyed drawing and randomly assigned them to one of three groups.

  • The first group of children was told they’d get a certificate with a gold seal and ribbon if they drew a picture.

  • The second group received the same reward but wasn’t told about it until after the drawing was completed.

  • The last group expected no reward and was not given a reward.

  • After the drawing activity, these children were monitored over the next few days through one-way mirrors to see how much they continued drawing on their own.

  • What they found was that the children who expected the reward were less likely to engage in drawing for fun.

  • Even more interesting is that those who received a surprise reward were the most likely to engage in drawing for fun.

  • What’s important to note is that these were all children who enjoyed drawing for fun at the beginning of the experiment.

  • By associating the activity of drawing with an extrinsic reward, the certificate with the gold seal, they were able to decrease the child’s intrinsic motivation to draw.

  • Now you may be asking yourself, "how does this relate to dopamine and failure?"

  • The presence or absence of a reward can be thought of as the difference between success and failure.

  • If we only do things that were sure well succeed at and try to avoid failure at all costs, we only make the process of reaching our goal that much harder.

  • We rationalize that we are only doing the task so we can get the reward at the end.

  • As a result, we are less likely to lean into hard work in the future.

  • Instead of focusing on the outcome, you want to focus on the process instead.

  • Try adopting a growth mindset and let the incremental improvements be your measure of success instead of the outcome or end goal.

  • If youre studying for an exam, instead of focusing on getting an A and tying how you feel to how you perform, try to find enjoyment in learning and increasing your knowledge.

  • In doing so, you can learn to find enjoyment and peak your dopamine from the process and not the outcome.

  • When you learn to love the process and don’t focus on the outcome, youre less likely to be held back by fear of failure.

  • It’s okay to fail because your enjoyment of that activity is not tied to your success or failure.

  • This also allows you to better cope with failure and tap into one of its greatest benefits: the opportunity to learn.

  • Failure is one of our greatest teachers.

  • When you make a mistake, youre forced to look back and find out what went wrong before you can go back to the drawing board.

  • In contrast, when you succeed, you don’t always know exactly what you did right that led to your success.

  • The next question, then, is how do we learn from our failures and use them to our advantage?

  • A great place to start is by applying the FDSI cycle.

  • This stands for failure, diagnosis, solution, and implementation.

  • The first step is to clearly identify the failure. "I did poorly on my exam" for example.

  • Next, you need to diagnose the problem:

  • Why did you do poorly on your exam?

  • Was there a certain topic you didn’t understand?

  • Did you forget a piece of information?

  • Were you unable to make the associations between certain concepts?

  • Identifying exactly where your deficiencies were is key for the next step, which is to formulate a solution based on your diagnosis.

  • Using the example of a poor exam grade, perhaps youve diagnosed the problem as incomplete memorization.

  • The solution then might be to incorporate more active recall into your study schedule in the form of flashcards.

  • Or maybe the issue was comprehension.

  • In this case, the solution might be to utilize the Feynman technique or other similar techniques to improve your understanding of the material.

  • If you need help determining a solution to a study problem, we have an entire playlist covering different study tips and strategies - link in the description.

  • Once you have your solution, all that’s left is to implement it.

  • Identifying the failure, diagnosing what went wrong, and coming up with a solution is all meaningless if you don’t actually implement your solution.

  • Knowing what you need to do is not the same as actually doing it.

  • Once youve implemented your solution, you should continue to refine your processes through additional FDSI cycles.

  • By repeating this cycle of identifying the failure, diagnosing the problem, formulating a solution, and implementing it, you can use your failures to your advantage and learn to love the process.

  • If you enjoyed this video, be sure to check out our Study Tips and Strategies playlist or this other video.

  • Much love and I’ll see you guys there.

Were often afraid of failure.

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