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How to Increase Your Chances of Success, According to Star Psychologist Adam Grant: Set Yourself a Failure Budget
When billionaire Spanx founder Sara Blakely was a child, her father would encourage her and her brother to fail.
“He would ask us at the dinner table what we had failed at that week, and if we didn’t have something to tell him, he would actually be disappointed,” she has recalled.
Her dad was an attorney, not a psychologist, but according to star psychologist Adam Grant, Blakely’s dad had stumbled on a profound trick for increasing his kids’ chance of success in life — one you can steal not just for your own children, if you have them, but for yourself as well.
The paradoxical truth: To succeed more you need to fail more
Most of us tend to think of failure as something to minimize or avoid. But many super-successful people see failure differently.
In the early days of SpaceX, Elon Musk famously gave employees a pep talk in which he told them, “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” Richard Branson celebrates failure as one of life’s greatest learning tools.
These innovators and entrepreneurs understand the science that shows being outside your…
