My daughter is in the beginner phase of life. Which is to say, not only is she literally just beginning (she’s 8), but she is trying all kinds of new things in school (writing essays, calculating the area of a shape, learning a new language) and outside of school (soccer, basketball, robotics, piano, ballet). And the common thread of all of these experiences is that – because she’s trying these things for the first time – she’s not particularly good at any of them. (Nor are any of her classmates – in third grade, the struggle is real).

So I wasn’t surprised when she came to me utterly frustrated, saying that it’s not fun to be struggling with so many things at once. But this was a parenting moment I felt ready for. “I get it,” I said, in what I hoped was my wisest tone. “But remember that every failure is an amazing opportunity to learn. So think of it like you’re learning all the time!” She didn’t buy it. “It doesn’t feel like that at all,” she said, before grumbling and walking away. But I felt confident in my advice. Everyone knows that failure is the best teacher…right?

It occurred to me that actually, I had no idea.

Do we really learn from our failures?

It turns out we really hate failing. So much so that we avoid it, even when it costs us – there is research showing that investors stop checking their finances when the stock market drops, and that’s emblematic of the norm, not the exception. Which is a big problem if the best way to learn is through failure. But is it? Hypothetically, yes – failure often contains important lessons. But the truth is, we tend not to internalize them.

Instead, research shows that people chronically under-learn from failure. Why? There are a lot of reasons, but they all add up to one thing: ego. Research (but also life experience) tells us that failure makes us feel bad about ourselves and so we tune it out. That tracks – if I’m honest, I can see that after failing, I have often either wallowed in a cloud of low self-esteem (for the big ones), or just ignored it and moved on (for the small ones). These paths are much easier than examining my lack of success for lessons. Plus, learning from failure takes mental work. If you succeed, the feedback is essentially ‘do more of that.’ But if you fail, there might be many possible culprits. And not only do you have to push past that ‘I failed’ feeling, you then have to be able to identify the thing that went wrong, and figure out how to fix it. That’s hard.

Even experts – who are better at learning from failure – have a threshold. One experiment with heart surgeons (they defined ‘failure’ as a patient dying so high stakes) found that the surgeons learned from their first few failures but after that, not so much – again because of ego. In one participant’s words, “I would feel so frustrated. I would seriously doubt whether I deserve to be a surgeon. A few negative events could be learning opportunities but if it happens more than that, I don’t think I qualify.” It turns out failure breeds imposter syndrome, even in heart surgeons.

The surprising case for learning from success

On the other hand, success makes us feel great. It motivates us, raises our self-esteem and generally gets us excited and even more engaged in whatever it is we’re doing – which is the perfect context for learning. Success, unlike failure, makes us open to feedback because it’s all about how we can become even more successful, instead of about how we messed up.

Our brains reinforce all of this. Researchers at MIT found that brain cells keep track of whether or not our recent behaviors were successful or not. When we’re successful, the brain activates a lingering signal that effectively says ‘you did the right thing!’ and makes it more likely you’ll continue succeeding. But after failures, there was no such signal – and no such learning.

Contrary to every graduation speech you’ve ever heard, we actually learn more from our successes than our failures.

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That said, I don’t think failure is useless – but the lessons don’t come automatically. So when can failure actually teach us something? I think it can happen under three scenarios:

1/ When we take our ego out of it

One of my worst bosses was also one of my greatest teachers. She was awful – she pit my colleagues and I against each other, refused to mentor, micromanaged, shifted the goalposts with no explanation, and projected her anxiety onto anyone in her path. But my next job was as a manager, and her failures became my learnings. I knew exactly what not to do and that became a useful template for how to be good in that job.

Why were these lessons so effective? Because we are great at learning from other people’s failures. And that makes sense because in those situations, we have no ego. I have a friend who is pretty good at analyzing other people’s problems but struggles to use that same rigor on herself. (The friend is me.)

2/ When we change the way we’re thinking about the challenge

It turns out that mindset really matters and how we think about a challenge can dictate whether or not we can learn from it if we fail. Psychologist Carol Dweck identified two different orientations that people bring to a challenge: 1/ mastery-orientation, where the goal is to get better, or 2/ performance-orientation, where the goal is to look competent. Through the lens of #1, success or failure are just data points along the way to mastering something. But through the lens of #2, success or failure is a judgement of you and your abilities. So if you look at failure as a step on the road to your goal, you’ll logically draw lessons from it, and move forward. But if you look at failure as an end in itself, your learning will stop there – you feel personally indicted, and you become less inclined to try to tackle challenges in the future.

3/ When we’re in an environment where it’s truly safe to fail

In 2012 Google launched Project Aristotle to identify the secrets of their most successful teams. The initiative analyzed over 180 teams to discover what characteristics made its highest performing teams exceptional. The answer wasn’t in educational background, technical skill or organization structure. The most important trait was psychological safety— the shared belief that a team is safe for taking risks. In other words, you are free to fail, admit it and learn.

Which brings me back to my daughter and the bad advice I gave her (you might say I failed). I’m going to try again, and this time I’m going to take a different tack. First, I’m going to tell her about some of my failures – and believe me when I say that she will jump at the chance to analyze and learn from those. Next, I’m going to tell her that it’s ok to fail and to talk about it. Not because she should, as the conventional wisdom says, “celebrate her failures.” But because if I can create an environment where she feels comfortable failing, I know she’s more likely to learn from it. And finally, I’m going to ask her to think about her challenges differently. Third grade is for learning, not mastery. And the goal isn’t to look good in front of other people, it’s to get better and better – a process that is neither fast nor linear. Failure – and success – are neither the destination nor the verdict.

Success may be the better natural teacher. But failure can teach the deeper lessons. Together, they can help us navigate anything, as long as we’re paying attention to both.