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Regardless of how much homoerotic clutching is in your personal success story, the lesson was that it was the failures that made us better.

Except no, no, no they didn't. We learn far more from success than we do failure. MIT scientists hooked up something to a monkey's brain, a laser probably, and then watched as the monkey tried various activities successfully and unsuccessfully. They found that every success registered brain activity that influenced later attempts in a way that failures didn't. Failures didn't seem to do anything. Doing something right made it far easier for the monkey to do it right again in the future.

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So what then to make of the old advice? Well, I'd suggest it might better be rephrased "We learn by trying again." (Assuming you have the common sense to not fail the same way twice.)

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Success! No, wait ...

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At a higher level, we can look at another one of those pesky cognitive biases, in this case the choice-supportive bias. This is what happens when you make a choice and then immediately seek out justifications that you made the right choice. Evidence that supports the choice is promoted over evidence that suggests otherwise. (If you've ever met anyone who bought a Mac, you'll have seen this one in action.) What makes this so insidious is that in cases where the choice was actually and objectively a mistake, it's incredibly difficult to figure that out, because your own damned brain will fight like hell to prevent you from seeing it.