And so the once-autonomous striver, bulletproof and bowling alone, is forced to throw that old life over the side and start making other connections. A new unifying principle coalesces around some "higher purpose," and damned if the new life doesn't feel like an upgrade. Thus does failure lead, roundabout, to happiness. "London and Chicago seized the opportunities provided by their great fires to remake themselves into grander and more coherent cities," Haidt writes in The Happiness Hypothesis. "People sometimes seize such opportunities, too, rebuilding beautifully those parts of their lives and life stories that they could never have torn down voluntarily."
Everyone gets laid low by failure sometimes, however briefly. The real difference between people who pull themselves out somehow versus the people who do not, says Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, a psychologist at Yale, is that some slip into "rumination"—a spiral of morbid self-involvement that's extremely difficult to shake. But what separates the ruminators from the resilients? Why is it that the same set of circumstances that drives one person deeper into the mud makes another stronger? Is there just a kind of native temperament, a Donald Trump-ish optimism some psychologists have described as "enthusiasm and persistence in the face of setbacks"—something that helps some people find the kernel of good inside the bad and profit from it—that's either in play or isn't? How can we learn, as Samuel Beckett put it, to "fail better"?
"Failing better" boils down to three things. It's a matter of controlling our emotions, adjusting our thinking, and recalibrating our beliefs about ourselves and what we can do in the world.
"Chess is a game of failure," says Bruce Pandolfini, an American chess master known for his work teaching young chess players. (Sir Ben Kingsley played him in Searching for Bobby Fischer.) "At the beginning, you lose—a lot. The kids who are going to succeed are the ones who learn to stand it. A lot of young players find losing so devastating they never adapt, never learn to metabolize that failure and to not take it personally. But good players lose and then put the game behind them emotionally."
Pandolfini teaches his students this calming sense of perspective. The present moment is laid out against the past. What you see is compared to your memories of what you've seen—and mastered—before. What you have in the end is a kind of coherent story. He calls it chess instruction, but really, it works with anything. In fact, it's not so different from the way writing down your feelings in a journal helps you process failure and move on, a phenomenon demonstrated by James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas.
Teachers, studies reveal, can foster resiliency among students, creating students who don't flinch from failure but actually welcome it as a learning opportunity. People have one of two belief systems about how intelligence works, says Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford. We think intelligence is either "fixed" or "malleable." In other words, we're pretty much as smart and good and competent as we're going to get, or else we're a work in progress, and the way forward is up.
People who believe intelligence is fixed are less resilient. If you don't believe you can learn anything from your mistakes, you won't welcome failure with open arms.
But students who are taught that the brain is plastic and that they can become smarter and more competent—that the brain grows, like a muscle, when you work it hard—show a spike in grades and enjoy school more. Because they're less afraid to fail, they succeed more.
How much failure is too much? Bubble-wrapping kids to shield them from failing does them no favors. Without that trial-and-error learning from gradual exposure to risk, kids become vulnerable to anxiety disorders, says Michael Liebowitz, a psychiatrist at Columbia University. But at the other extreme, exposure to repeated and relentless failure can crush the spirit of even a resilient kid. A parent's job, then, is to create a kind of sweet spot of exposure to failure.
"There's a bleeding edge of where we have to push ourselves—it can't be too far in front of us," says Michael Ungar, head of the International Resilience Project at Dalhousie University. "You can't just say to a kid, go learn to swim on your own. But you can take them through the process gradually. Let them see what buoyancy feels like, let them have little moments of mild distress where everything is then immediately okay—manageable risk. This is how we learn to solve problems, and receive an inoculation against major stressors. But there is a little bit of a cult of self-esteem that short-changes it all."
Failure can't help us if we're oblivious to it. And yet. There's something deeply sympathetic, and not a little familiar, in repeat failure. So often are our rehabilitations short-lived. Despite our best intentions, our mightiest resolve, we find ourselves endlessly repeating earlier failures.
But the great payoff in failing is it gives us another chance, as Alex Trebek encourages his Jeopardy contestants who risk everything and crash down to zero to "start building." To begin again from scratch is itself part of the American script.
In this sense, failing well amounts to taking a weird kind of pride not just in the potential positive consequences of failure but in the failure itself—the awful, agreeable humanity of it. Failure drives us out of our caves and into the world of Other People, that plane where happiness is less perishable.
