Try, Try Again: Why Failure Is Necessary for Success

While I hardly identify as being hugely successful in my profession, I guess I've done alright over the years. Most people who know about my work know about my successes (including 10 academic books, over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, this award and that award, etc.).

Sure, I've done OK. But what I don't tend to amplify out into the universe are the many failures that I have encountered so frequently across my career. Consider the following:

• I got into less than half the Ph.D. programs I'd applied for. Way less!
• For nearly every published paper I have, I can recount at least one rejection from another publisher.
• For every book I've published, there are multiple "we're sorry, but your book idea does not meet our mission; we wish you luck" situations.
• When I started my academic career, I applied to well over 100 academic jobs. Most of them totally ghosted me.

And this is to say nothing of the failures in my personal life over the last half century...

That said, like many of us, I learned about the importance of failing in life as a critical part of learning. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. This all speaks to the issue of resilience.

Resilience in Evolutionary Perspective

The psychology of resilience has an interesting evolution-based take. In writing about the nature of evolved psychological adaptations, renowned evolutionary psychologist, David Buss (2024), Buss likens psychological adaptations to callouses on one's foot or hand. The capacity for callouses exists, regardless of whether any callouses actually emerge in one's life. Callous-producing mechanisms only build callouses if certain experiences have taken place.

If you have just started running long distances for the first time, you'll likely notice callouses on certain parts of your feet. If you take up tennis, you will find callouses on your hands and fingers. Etc. This is all normal—and these callouses help to provide long-term protection for your skin.

We can think of psychological resilience in a parallel way. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (2018) argue that being sheltered from adverse experiences in life offers short-term benefits—but these benefits often come with long-term problems.

The ability to deal with adversity relies partly on one's experiences with adversity. From this perspective, sheltering a child from adversity too much during their upbringing may actually lead to lowered resilience in adulthood.

Drawing on these ideas, in our book Positive Evolutionary Psychology (Geher & Wedberg, 2022), Nicole Wedberg and I present a thesis regarding the relationship between failures and successes in one's life. We essentially put forward an ironic prediction: More failures in life may predict more successes. This hypothesis, rooted in the evolutionary psychology of resilience, might help shed light on how people may be able to deal with those inevitable failures in life in healthy ways.

The Success Study

In a recent study on this topic that was spearheaded by my student collaborator (Kardas et al., 2025), my research team asked the questions as to whether (a) the number of major failures that one perceives in their life experiences tend to go hand-in-hand with the number of major successes that one perceives in their life experiences. Further, we sought to ascertain whether (b) the perceived impact of one's history of successes in life goes hand-in-hand with the perceived impact of one's history of failures in life.

In a study of nearly 200 English-speaking adults, we found strong evidence for each. In this study, we asked people to think about and list as many substantial successes in life as they could. We also asked them to rate each success in terms of the impact that it has had on their life, and we asked the same kinds of questions to obtain an index of total number of substantial failures as well as the impact that they believed these failures to have had on their lives.

The "failure is predictive of success" hypothesis was supported. People who reported a lot of successes also reported a lot of failures (while those who reported few successes tended to report few failures). Findings based on the impact of success and failure were consistent with this pattern: People who reported that successes had impacted them largely also tended to report that failures had impacted them largely. And vice versa.

Bottom Line: We Don't Have to Fear Failure

Since we were little, so many of us have been told that failure is OK and, in fact, that it is necessary for learning and for ultimately succeeding in life. Taking an evolutionary perspective to this topic, a recent study by my research team (Kardas et al., 2025) provides strong evidence for this age-old adage.

Participants in this study described successes and failures in their lives along two dimensions (total number; perceived impact). In our analysis, we found that people who reported more successes in life also reported more failures in life, and vice versa. What's more, people who reported that successes impacted their lives a lot also tended to report that failures impacted their lives a lot, and vice versa.

So next time you fail at something in your life (mess up at work, fail to get a promotion, upset your partner without meaning to, get a speeding ticket with a mile of getting home, lose your phone, crack an egg on the kitchen floor, unwittingly insult a friend, fail a college exam, lose at trivia, go around all day with your shirt inside-out, etc.), it may benefit you to remember that failure is not only part of life—it is an essential kind of experience that ultimately predicts success in one's future. Our psychological resilience evolved this way.

Don't beat yourself up over that recent failure. We all make mistakes. Get back up on that horse—each of these cliches actually is rooted in deep truths about the human condition. In life, success and failure actually do go hand-in-hand.

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