Embrace the Failure
A father repeatedly asked his daughter the same question during dinnertime: "What did you fail at this week?"
The father didn’t care if his child aced her math test. He didn’t care how many girl scout cookies she'd sold, or how many goals she'd scored on her soccer team.
No, the father wanted to know what she had failed at. And when she told him, do you know what his reaction was?
He gave her a high five!
Every week growing up, her father made her reflect on something she'd failed at. And the daughter embraced answering that question.
“If I didn't have something that I had failed at, he actually would be disappointed,” she said.
That person is Sara Blakely, who founded Spanx. Ten years ago, Forbes named Blakely the youngest self-made woman billionaire in the world.
Blakely’s story reminds us to embrace failure and how failure can help us succeed—and learn.
Take a quick read of Scientific American’s "Getting It Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn."
Here's an excerpt: “People remember things better, longer, if they are given very challenging tests on the material, tests at which they are bound to fail. In a series of experiments, they showed that if students make an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve information before receiving an answer, they remember the information better than in a control condition in which they simply study the information. Trying and failing to retrieve the answer is actually helpful to learning.”
The article ends with a quick summary: “And remember, even if you get the questions wrong as you self-test yourself during study, the process is still useful, indeed much more useful than just studying. Getting the answer wrong is a great way to learn.”
During your summer bar preparation, you will complete tons of multiple choice, essay, performance test questions. You should find yourself taking practice exams, identifying your weaknesses, working on those weaknesses, taking more practice exams, identifying additional (or the same) weaknesses, working on those weaknesses, taking more practice exams, and repeating the process over and over again.
Don’t be discouraged about getting questions wrong. That's actually a good thing as long as you're taking the time to review the explanatory answers and learning that information. As the Scientific American article stated: “Trying and failing to retrieve the answer is actually helpful to learning.”
