A crown you must earn

Dear Happiness & Leadership Community,

In my column this week, I write about how it has taken me many years of growing up to feel strong enough to open up about my fears and failures.

Yesterday, I had the fun honor of interviewing Scot Wingo , a beloved Triangle serial entrepreneur, who generously shared from his fountain of wisdom. Everyone praises him for his four entrepreneurial successes. But he said, "I fail everyday." Learning from these daily missteps is what has allowed for his successes.

This week, I provide insights into "productive failure" research from the elementary school classroom. When applied to work and home, the data guides us to NOT help out our teams or our children TOO much. Allow them, instead, to flounder and fail.

I have been researching the theme of Failure for over a decade.?It started because of feedback from a student in my UNC online reviews:?

“Professor Ueng did not share her failures.”

Sixteen years ago, on the first day of teaching Entrepreneurial Marketing at UNC Kenan Flagler, I asked my MBA students what they were hoping to learn from my class.?One woman raised her hand and said “I would like to learn from your failures.”?I politely listened to the rest of the comments and then went on to teach the syllabus that I had spent months preparing.

Queen of Failure?

In the years that followed, I started to open up my eyes to the importance of experiencing failures, and why that student wanted to learn from mine.?One winter, I managed to secure an in-person meeting with a noted literary agent in New York City. As we came down to the wire in finalizing my book proposal, my book coach suggested calling me “the queen of failure.”?That made me quite nervous. While I understood my coach’s guidance to have a unique angle, I still was not comfortable with openly sharing my failures, much less to be known uniquely for a talent at failing!

The next year, a women in technology group asked me to give a talk focused on failure.?I was finally opening up to being vulnerable and sharing on that topic.?I now know that being vulnerable is not a weakness, it is a strength.?I had to grow my confidence to be ready to share my failures on a public stage.

Helping too much?

Being vulnerable and sharing failures, anchors a discussion, opening up others to feel safe to also share. This is very different from the digital social media world that our youth have grown up in where everything is edited to make everyone glamorous and having loads of fun. The real world is much different. However, as parents, many of us fall guilty of insulating our children from failing, which makes them less resilient in the face of?difficult challenges.?By helping too much, we end up hurting our children.

The same can be said of teachers. I restarted piano studies last year after a four decade hiatus to honor the memory of my mom, my first teacher.?As part of that, I am a student of Noa Kageyama, performance psychologist on faculty at Juilliard. In his post this week?“Productive Failure”: Why Early Floundering Leads to Better Learning, Noa shares fascinating research with 7th grade students who are learning how to calculate average speed.?The students are divided into two groups: (1) using traditional direct instruction and (2) productive failure learning of complex problem assignments with no teacher support or homework.

The findings were that it was faster and more efficient to offer the right fix in the short term, rather than withhold the right strategy. In the long term, however, the productive failure group that did not get to the correct answer quickly, cultivated a deeper understanding of the fundamental principles and various ways of arriving at a solution, though at the expense of short term performance. Having the student struggle, search, and look in all the “wrong” places made them much more engaged in the learning process.

Struggling and failing first

This past weekend, I performed in another Presto Piano recital. I reminded myself of my own words?Comparison is the Thief of Joy?as I was the least advanced pianist of the two dozen attendees. My performance Beethoven Sonata Pathetique No. 8, Op. 13?II. Adagio Cantabile contained many mistakes.?Afterwards, I met a visitor, who started playing piano again, teaching himself by hacking around his digital keyboard on his own over the last several years.?As he tried out the Steinway, I was surprised to hear him play beautiful snippets of Bach’s Goldberg Variations?#1?and?#5?with great ease.?He said it took him a full year of working on his own to master these 2 variations. I fully appreciated this as it had taken me many weeks to play the introduction to the Variations, the?Aria at a rudimentary level.

I wonder how I am learning differently than he is, with my regular lessons. Teddy does have me practice a piece on my own, before he offers his suggestions, so my process is likely a blend of the best of both worlds. Teddy offers suggestions that I am unlikely to have ever thought of on my own that enable me to play better.?I appreciate his suggestions much more and implement them more readily, having struggled on my own first.

And this week I caught up over lunch with my friend, the coach who told me to make a poster entitled, “Grace, the Athlete” when I was training for my first marathon over two decades ago. I share her wise words each time I speak about the?power of visualization?in goal attainment. We were catching up after not seeing each other for many years, exchanging many life stories and lessons.?Toward the end of our conversation, she echoed the importance of failure, and how that is the only way to really learn.?

Optimizes our outcome

So for the last several years,?when I review the prior week, I list all the failures I “accomplished.”?And if there are many, I celebrate!?Indeed, we need many failures under our belt in order to know how to succeed.

Maybe I am now finally ready to be known as the "queen of failure."