The Antidote (17 page)

Yet though failure is ubiquitous, psychologists have long recognised that we find this notion appalling, and that we will go to
enormous lengths to avoid thinking about it. At its pathological extreme, this fear of failure is known as ‘kakorrhaphiophobia', the symptoms of which can include heart palpitations, hyperventilation and dizziness. Few of us suffer so acutely. But as we'll see, this may only be because we are so naturally skilled at ‘editing out' our failures, in order to retain a memory of our actions that is vastly more flattering than the reality. Like product managers with failures stuffed into a bedroom closet, we will do anything to tell a success-based story of our lives. This leads, among other consequences, to the entertaining psychological phenomenon known as ‘illusory superiority'. This mental glitch explains why, for example, the vast majority of people tell researchers that they consider themselves to be in the top 50 per cent of safe drivers – even though they couldn't possibly all be.

Like many commentators concerned about our reluctance to confront failure, Robert McMath likes to argue that we should behave ‘more like scientists'. The implication is that scientists, unlike the rest of us, must by necessity learn to become more comfortable with failure. Professional scientists, not surprisingly, tend to share this flattering view. The goal of every good scientist is discovering the truth, so he can't be picky about whether the results of his experiments confirm or undermine his hypotheses. Scientific research involves devising a hypothesis, testing it, and then dealing with whatever results you obtain – even if they ruin your hopes of a prize-winning breakthrough. Right? Actually, maybe not. A fascinating series of studies of working scientists, conducted by the Irish-born researcher Kevin Dunbar, presents a very different picture – and confirms just how deeply and universally human the tendency to avoid confronting failure really is. Scientists, it transpires, may be just as bad as everyone else.

Dunbar negotiated access to four leading molecular biology
laboratories, and began observing the work that was conducted there. For months, he videotaped interviews and recorded the weekly lab meetings at which researchers discussed their findings. (This kind of examination of what scientists do on a day-to-day basis is rare, not least because scientists themselves frequently dismiss it as irrelevant.) Dunbar's first discovery was that the researchers encountered failure all the time. ‘If you're a scientist and you're doing an experiment,' he said later, ‘about half the experiments that you do actually turn out wrong.' For whatever reason – faulty procedures, or a flawed hypothesis – the results obtained did not mesh with the conclusions towards which the scientists believed they were advancing. As one of Dunbar's subjects put it in a meeting, describing yet another failure: ‘I saw the results, and I wanted to throw myself off a bridge.'

Things got more interesting when Dunbar examined how the researchers responded to this deluge of failure. As he told the neuroscience writer Jonah Lehrer, their reactions followed a predictable sequence. First, a scientist would blame his equipment or techniques – suspecting that a measuring device must be malfunctioning, or that he himself had made a stupid mistake. If the problem couldn't be explained away so easily, the researcher would then repeat the experiment, sometimes several times, in hopes that the anomaly would vanish. And if that didn't work, he would often simply put the experiment aside. Laboratories are busy places; scientists are overworked; there are vastly more potential avenues for research than could ever be pursued, and so researchers have to make choices about what they will focus on next. Consistently, Kevin Dunbar found, they chose to neglect their inexplicable results, focusing on their successes and avoiding dwelling upon their failures.

Using brain imaging, Dunbar has examined the part of the
human brain that seems most implicated in screening out failure: the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or DLPFC. This region plays a crucial role in filtering out irrelevant or unwanted incoming information, which is essential if you want to concentrate, say, on a single conversation at a noisy cocktail party. (People with damaged DLPFCs experience difficulty with such tasks.) But a similar filtering process appears to be triggered when we are presented with information that violates our expectations, even when it is far from irrelevant. In one experiment, Dunbar showed videos to an audience of physics students in which two objects of different sizes, dropped from the top of a tower, appeared to behave in defiance of the laws of gravity: they fell at different speeds. Physics students know that's not what really happens, and their DLPFCs lit up – much more so than was the case in viewers of the videos who weren't so familiar with this law of physics. Dunbar's hunch is that the physics students' brains were reacting to the unwanted, clearly inexplicable information by attempting to delete it from their awareness.

Back in Ann Arbor, at the museum of failed products, it wasn't hard to imagine how a similar aversion to confronting failure might have been responsible for the very existence of many of the products lining its shelves. Each one must have made it through a series of meetings at which nobody realised that the product was doomed. Perhaps nobody wanted to contemplate the prospect of failure; perhaps someone did, but didn't want to bring it up for discussion. Even if the product's likely failure was recognised, Robert McMath explained, those responsible for marketing it might well have responded by ploughing
more
money into it. This is a common reaction when a product looks like it's going to be a lemon, since with a big enough marketing spend, a marketing manager can at least guarantee a few sales,
sparing the company total humiliation. By the time reality sets in, McMath notes in
What Were They Thinking?,
it is quite possible that ‘the executives will have been promoted to another brand, or recruited by another company'. Thanks to a collective unwillingness to face up to failure, more money will have been invested in the doomed product, and little energy will have been dedicated to examining what went wrong. Everyone involved will have conspired – perhaps without realising what they're doing – never to think or speak of it again.

The first big problem with our reluctance to think about or analyse failure – whether our own, or other people's – is that it leads to an utterly distorted picture of the causes of success. Some years ago, a management theorist from Oxford University named Jerker Denrell was attending an academic conference in Stockholm, in his native Sweden, and sitting through the kind of speech that can make it hard to stay awake. Up at the podium, a fellow researcher was explaining his findings about the personality traits of highly successful entrepreneurs. According to several new case studies, the speaker announced, high achievers demonstrated two key characteristics: they were willing to persevere in the face of setbacks, and they possessed enough charisma to convince others to follow them. All of which is boringly obvious, and it is easy to imagine eyelids across the conference hall beginning to droop. But Denrell found himself paying attention. The speech he was hearing, he realised, embodied an error that he had been encountering for some time; he had just never heard it so clearly expressed. It was a mistake so basic that it threatened to undermine a large proportion of his colleagues' work.

It may well be true that successful entrepreneurs possess
perseverance and leadership skills, of course. What is less obvious – and much less boring – is what the speaker neglected to mention: that those traits are likely to be the characteristics of extremely
unsuccessful
people, too. ‘Think about it,' Denrell observed afterwards. ‘Incurring large losses requires both persistence … and the ability to persuade others to pour their money down the drain.' People without much perseverance or charisma are more likely to end up in the middle, experiencing neither great success nor great failure. (If you never stick at anything, and if you can't persuade others to follow you, you may never lead an army of like-minded souls to a stunning victory – but nor will you lead them off a cliff.) It seems entirely likely that the very successful and the very unsuccessful might actually have rather similar personalities. The only indisputable difference between the two is that the very unsuccessful are much, much less frequently interviewed by management scholars who are studying the causes of success. They are, after all, failures. Even if researchers
wanted
to interview them – which, by and large, they don't – it is hard to imagine how they might track them down in significant numbers. Success happens in public; indeed, achieving celebrity is part of many people's definition of what constitutes success. Failure is occasionally spectacular at first, but people who fail dwell largely in obscurity.

This problem, which is known as ‘survivor bias' or the ‘undersampling of failure', is already extremely familiar in many areas of scholarship, and of life. Most of us grasp it intuitively in certain contexts, of which the canonical example is gambling. We know, deep down, not to conclude that if we have enjoyed a winning streak at the roulette table, we must possess some magical ability to predict the behaviour of the roulette wheel. We understand that winning at roulette is a matter of chance, and that probability
dictates that winning streaks will sometimes occur. Losing streaks are more common, of course. It's just that they don't tend to cause any intrigued whispering around the casino. You never hear about all the men and women who
didn't break
the bank at Monte Carlo.

The speech that Jerker Denrell heard in Stockholm was one glaring example of how our conversations about success are always falling foul of the undersampling of failure. But there are countless others. Take the bestselling book
The Millionaire Next Door,
by the American researcher Thomas Stanley. This purports to be a research-based portrait of the millionaire personality, and though the jacket describes its conclusions as ‘surprising', they really aren't. The typical millionaire, Stanley reveals, is disciplined and driven, street-smart but not necessarily intellectual, and frugal to the point of tight-fistedness.
The Millionaire Next Door,
its publishers claim, ‘shattered one of contemporary America's most firmly held myths: that wealthy individuals belong to an elite group of the highly educated and exceedingly lucky, who often inherit their money and spend it on lavish purchases and pampered lifestyles'. The implication throughout – and surely the explanation for the book's commercial success – is that if you, too, were to become self-disciplined, street-smart and frugal, you too could make a million. Except that, knowing what we know about survivor bias, that doesn't necessarily follow at all. Judging by his own account of his research, Stanley spent no time whatsoever studying the personalities of those who had tried but failed to become millionaires, or those to whom the notion had never occurred. (To be fair, he does mention people who made a fortune but didn't manage to hold onto their money.) And so he has few grounds for concluding that frugality or self-discipline – or any other trait, for that matter – is part of the recipe for
becoming a millionaire. Others who were equally frugal or self-disciplined might have come nowhere near millionairehood.

‘Suppose you look at successful chief executives and you find they all brush their teeth,' Denrell told me. ‘Well, you realise that this isn't a thing unique to chief executives, because everybody brushes their teeth. You know this, because you brush your teeth, too. So you dismiss it. But say they have some strange trait that you don't have much experience of. Well, it will seem to you that this is something that explains their success. It seems to make sense, after all.' And it feels intuitively right to be focusing on the successful, not on the failures: ‘If you want to learn how to fly, you look at birds; you don't look at cockroaches.' But focusing solely on success leads us badly astray.

One of the more peculiar consequences of the survivor bias is the way that it casts doubt not only on the work of scholars who study success, but on the explanations that successful people themselves give – and may sincerely believe – for their own achievements. Bookshops are stuffed with autobiographical volumes of advice such as the one released in 2006 by the multi-millionaire publisher Felix Dennis, entitled
How to Get Rich: The Distilled Wisdom of One of Britain's Wealthiest Self-made Entrepreneurs.
Dennis's book is far less annoying than most such works, thanks largely to his disarming sense of humour about being worth £700 million, and his refreshing honesty about how much he enjoys the yachts and Caribbean holidays and Michelin-starred food that his lifestyle affords him. And yet, beneath the bragging, his book conveys a similar message to many of the others: to make a fortune, you need stubbornness, a lack of regard for what other people think of you, and a willingness to take risks. Those qualities, Dennis suggests, made him what he is. To which Jerker Denrell might respond: how could he possibly know? Dennis, obviously, has lived only one life,
and has no experience of an alternative one, culminating in financial failure, with which to compare it. Perhaps thousands of others exhibited the same determination, cheekiness, and pluck, but got nowhere. Maybe not. Maybe Dennis's ascent was due to dumb luck, or to some other personality trait, so that he actually succeeded in spite of his stubbornness or fondness for risks. His self-diagnosis may be correct, of course; it's just that he isn't automatically in a better position than anyone else to say.

Dennis's focus on risk-taking raises an intriguing additional point, which is that the willingness to fail is
itself
one of the personality traits we may come to overvalue as a result of survivor bias. This is the problem with homilies such as those of Richard Branson, who writes: ‘Being unafraid of failure is, I believe, one of the most important qualities of a champion.' He may be right about the importance of not fearing failure, but then again, you don't hear speeches or read autobiographies by people who were unafraid of failure and then did indeed simply fail. A willingness to fail might not be associated with success at all; alternatively, as Denrell points out, a willingness to court failure by taking big risks might be correlated with both great success and great failure. The definition of a ‘big risk', after all, is that it carries a significant likelihood of things not working out.