“This is not just survival of the fittest,” Dr. Wang said. “These people became better versions of themselves,” he said, adding that the crucial contribution of this research is that the performance improvement is causally linked to the near-miss event itself.

[Like what you’re reading? Sign up here for the Smarter Living newsletter to get stories like this (and much more!) delivered straight to your inbox every Monday morning.]

Accepting our failures and growing from them is a core component of any successful career. Keeping a log of your failures can even be a source of motivation. Earlier this year in Smarter Living we talked about failure résumés. Whereas your normal résumé organizes your successes, accomplishments and your overall career progress, your failure résumé tracks the times you didn’t quite hit the mark, along with what lessons you learned. (But, uh, you should still probably send in your regular résumé on your next job application.)

Melanie Stefan, a lecturer at Edinburgh Medical School, popularized the failure résumé after she published her own, which listed the graduate programs she didn’t get into, degrees she didn’t finish or pursue, harsh feedback from an old boss and even the rejections she got after auditioning for several orchestras.

“At the time, I thought we were really not talking enough about failure” in academia, Dr. Stefan told The Times in February. “I had just finished my Ph.D. and was applying for so many fellowships to do a postdoc, and I got rejection after rejection, and I said it was something we don’t really talk about a lot.”

She added: “Sometimes I look back on them and see how much I’ve actually struggled to be where I am. That’s a powerful reminder that I deserve to be here.” It is also, she said, “a good reminder of how much you’ve tried.”

Yes, this all sounds a little uncomfortable. Why focus so much on the things that bring us pain? Our career embarrassments and mistakes?