Learn the art of failing upwards

We all fail sometimes, and it’s never a good feeling. But some failures are inevitable, because success can never be guaranteed. What matters is how you respond when something goes wrong. React well to your difficulties, and you’ll turn failures into valuable learning experiences.

That was famously illustrated in a study which asked two groups of managers to do a task. One team was told the exercise would measure their management abilities while the other was told it was an opportunity to develop their management skills. But in fact the assignment was designed to be impossible and so neither group succeeded. What’s interesting is that the first team felt like failures because their skills didn’t measure up and they didn’t improve when they were given the opportunity to try again. But the second group analysed their failures and performed significantly better on their second attempt.