We learn from success better than we do from failure.

It comes as no surprise to me that a MIT study has concluded that we learn from success better than we do from failure.

“We have shown that brain cells keep track of whether recent behaviors were successful or not,” Earl K. Miller, Professor of Neuroscience at MIT’s Institute for Learning and Memory said. Furthermore, when a behavior was successful, cells became more finely tuned to what the animal was learning. After a failure, there was little or no change in the brain – nor was there any improvement in behavior. (Neuron, July 30, 2009)

If you want to learn something, consider chunking down your “lessons” into steps in which you succeed more easily – increasing the difficulty of success only slightly as you go along.

Nothing builds success like more success!

Consider your goals – certainly you’ll feel accomplished if you succeed. But what if you fail? What then? Do you have an “intermediate” goal you’ll achieve if you fall short of your “big” goal? In this case, you’ll have succeeded – and learned from the experience more than if you had simply failed.

Or, what if you do “fail” – what then? What have you succeeded at in the process of “failing”? What positive outcome did you achieve? Maybe you made a mess of one thing but scored at another in the process. What is it you did achieve? You may need to look hard – and in the finding, maybe you’ll discover the learning, too.

Study authors include Earl K. Miller, the MIT Picower Professor of Neuroscience, former MIT graduate student Mark H. Histed, now a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, and former postdoctoral fellow Anitha Pasupathy, now an assistant professor at the University of Washington. This work is supported by National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the Tourette’s Syndrome Association.