It’s not the failure that’s desirable

It’s not the failure that’s desirable, it’s the dauntless effort despite the risks, the discovery of what works and what doesn’t that sometimes only failure can reveal.

Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick

The meaning of the quote

In the book Make It Stick, Peter C. Brown describes a study with a college baseball team. Some players practiced against the same type of pitch again and again. Others faced a random mix of pitches. The players who got the random mix improved more.

A random pitch is harder to hit than a predictable one. You swing at balls you weren’t ready for and you miss. But every miss shows you something about timing that the easy, repeated pitch never could.

The quote says failing is not the point. Nobody should go looking for a bad grade or a failed business. The point is the effort you put into hard tasks even when you might fall short, and the lessons that come with it. Some lessons only show up after something goes wrong.

Brown wrote it to back up the main idea behind the book. Learning that feels hard tends to last longer than learning that feels smooth. Psychologists Elizabeth and Robert Bjork call this a desirable difficulty.

In the 1950s and 60s, the psychologist B.F. Skinner pushed the opposite idea. He wanted teaching broken into tiny steps so students would never get anything wrong. The book explains why that approach turned out to be flawed. Mistakes followed by feedback build stronger memory than a spotless run of easy answers.

Think about how most people study. They highlight a chapter and read it again. It feels great because every page looks familiar. Then the exam arrives and the words won’t come. A practice quiz you fail on Tuesday tells you exactly which pages to work on before Friday.

The risk part of the quote matters too. A failed attempt only teaches you something if you tried at the edge of what you can do and then looked closely at what happened. Someone who fails and shrugs learns nothing. Someone who avoids anything they might fail at learns nothing either. That’s why deep practice is about how deliberately you work, not how long.

The batters facing random pitches had the harder practice. They were also the ones who got better.

About the author

Peter C. Brown is a writer and novelist from St. Paul, Minnesota, and a former management consultant. He isn’t a scientist. He studied English literature, and years before Make It Stick he signed up for a beginner fiction course in Minneapolis where writers teach writers.

Brown told the Cult of Pedagogy podcast that he chose to write lots of short stories and learn from the mistakes in each one, instead of spending years polishing a single novel. He was living out the quote long before he wrote it.

The book started at a family gathering. Brown’s brother-in-law, the cognitive psychologist Henry L. Roediger III, described the memory research his team had been running for a decade with funding from the James S. McDonnell Foundation. Much of it went against common study habits, and the scientists wanted a way to reach ordinary readers.

Brown saw the chance and became the sole writer, so the book would keep one voice. He wrote each chapter first and then asked Roediger and Mark A. McDaniel to check the science. Roediger is a psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and McDaniel is a professor there too who directs its Center for Integrative Research on Cognition, Learning, and Education. Harvard University Press published the book in 2014, and it became an international bestseller.

Brown said writing it worked like the book’s own advice. Pulling the ideas out of his head and putting them into chapters was retrieval practice, and he learned the science by struggling with it.

Resources

• Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Book)
• Make It Stick by Peter C. Brown (Book summary)
• Episode 21: Make It Stick Author Peter Brown (Podcast)
• Make It Stick, Chapter Four: Embrace Difficulties (Article)
• Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way (Paper)