Part of the folklore about successful entrepreneurs is that they succeeded because they first failed. “Fail fast,” entrepreneurs are often told, and you’ll learn valuable lessons that will help you in your next venture.

But this is a myth. While second-chance stories are comforting, my research shows that entrepreneurs don’t learn from their mistakes. In fact, it’s the opposite: Fail once and you’re most likely to fail again. Believing in the myth only sets entrepreneurs up for more failure—and leads to disappointment and frustration.

There are many reasons why this is so, but the most important is basic psychology: Learning is a complex process that usually doesn’t proceed as simply and obviously as we hope. We struggle to take away lessons about what went wrong and then apply those insights to new situations. Or we simplify our experiences and leave out key details that would help us get a complete picture of why things went wrong.

Hard lessons

I reached these conclusions after working with thousands of entrepreneurs and startups over the years in academia and government. What I’ve found is that there is precious little evidence that failure helps people learn to be successful. Mostly, what passes for evidence are the cherry-picked stories of famous failed entrepreneurs who became successes later on. We conveniently forget the far larger number of entrepreneurs who failed and didn’t get to tell their tale. In the U.S., only about 50% of startups make it to their fifth birthday. Even fewer make it into adolescence or adulthood, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics.

To be sure, there are some quantitative studies that show serial entrepreneurs have greater success than first-timers. But the overwhelming majority of the studies don’t show that failed entrepreneurs specifically are more successful. In my opinion, the studies that do touch on failure usually come with limitations or caveats.