There are failures and there are Failures, but the differences between bankruptcy and financial diminishment, divorce and marital strife, spiritual crisis and anomie are distinctions of degree, not kind. And they are connected. Woe in one sphere strains the seams of others. It's not pretty. And that's why failure is something you wouldn't wish on your least agreeable relative.
Or would you?
A theory is gaining momentum that looks at failure differently. Failure, it says, is at worst a mixed blessing: It hurts, but can pay off in the form of learning and growth and wisdom. Some psychologists, like the University of Virginia's Jonathan Haidt, go even further, arguing that adversity, setbacks, and even trauma may actually be necessary for people to be happy, successful, and fulfilled. "Post-traumatic growth," it's sometimes called. Its observers are building a solid foundation under the anecdotes about wildly successful people who credit their accomplishments to earlier failures that pushed them to the edge of the abyss.
We do know that learning is error-driven—probably as a result of the brain trying to be efficient. Failures grab our attention. So many things happen the way we expect them to that mistakes register disproportionately. We're forced to integrate that new information. Researchers have found that the more wildly wrong our prediction was, the quicker we learn. The brain, you might say, feeds on failure. We are acutely sensitive to negative feedback, and this "negativity bias" drives learning, at least from teenagehood on up.
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