The fear of failure is powerful. Nobody wants to reveal to others, or to themselves, that they were not capable of doing something they tried to do.
This fear can be used as a source of motivation to keep you working hard toward your goals. Yet this same fear offers a convenient escape clause. You can never fail if you don’t bother to try.
Not trying is, of course, the ultimate failure, for it means you can never make progress toward your goals.
Jeff Howard is a school psychologist who studies how we teach youngsters and how they learn. He says most school systems informally break their student body into three groups: the very smart, the kind-of smart, and the kind-of dumb. By the time they reach the sixth grade, those consigned to the kind-of-dumb group are already well versed in the low expectations educators have for them.
“We put up barriers to these children in middle school, barriers we don’t expect them to climb over, barriers that they shouldn’t have to climb over.” For example, schools in Japan require every high school student to take calculus, while schools in the United States reserve calculus for the very smart. Howard argues that every student has the capacity to learn more—that studies of the learning capacity of your average four-year-old are more optimistic than the treatment received by the kind-of-dumb middle schooler.
The real danger in these categories is the big lesson they teach. For the top group, anything is possible, so they should never stop trying. For the bottom group, nothing is possible, so they shouldn’t bother trying. Indeed, these students mock their classmates who care or try to succeed.
Howard’s experimental solution involves putting students of all levels together and placing clear expectations and rewards in front of all of them. Early results show that all students, from all three levels, improved their test scores when expectations were increased.
When asked to describe significant regrets in their lives, more than eight out of ten people focused on actions they did not take rather than actions they did. In other words, they focused on things they failed to do rather than things they failed at doing.
Ricaurte 1999