Prepare for Failures

Yesterday I was watching this TEDx video by Mark Rober about something he called “The Super Mario Effect”. It is a great sharing of tricking your brain (and others’) into learning (hard) things, by “Focusing on the Princess and not the pits, to stick with a task and learn more”. I’d recommend everyone to watch the video to learn more about this “effect”, but this post isn’t supposed to talk about it. What I want to point out from the video is this experiment that Mark showed at the beginning of his talk.

Mark and his friend wrote a computer programming game, in which the players are supposed to create a script from some provided blocks that should make a car go from the start line to a finish point, and if the player can make the car land on the exact mark, they win.

Since Mark was a famous Youtuber, he was able to persuade 50,000 of his followers to play the game, but he didn’t tell them what he was really aiming. Secretly, he made two versions of the same game, of which the only difference is that when the player fails to deliver the car to its end point, in one version, they will be simply asked to try again, while in the other version, they will be deducted 5 points from their original 200.

The results pointed out that only 52% of people playing the “-5” version succeeded in solving the game, comparing to 68% success rate in the other group. This significant difference in the success rate is explained by the fact that people from the first group, on average, do only 5 tries before success/give up, comparing to 12 tries for people on the other group.

To be honest, I did expect some results like that when I listened to Mark explaining the experiment. As I once mentioned in the How to learn coding post, giving up is a common (and sometimes necessary) reaction when we feel like we’re losing (time, money, etc.). I would even go out on a limb and say that it might be one of our instincts, or (to borrow Carl Jung’s idea), one part of the collective unconscious that human shares. Without it, we wouldn’t run away from danger when we face one (for example, a tiger might have taken one or two of our limbs, but we would still not give up on hunting it). Needless to say, human’s modern lives are too complicated for our instincts, which were developed over millions of years in the wild, so of course, in many cases (like this case, for learning), it is advisable to forgo that instinc and stick to the goal (after all, those points that the people from the “-5” group lost every time the fail are just some meaningless numbers somebody made up), but that’s easy if the things you lose don’t really matter. What if they do?

Last weekend, when talking to my mom over the phone, as I tried to compare lives between Vietnam, our home country, and Finland, where I live now, something occured to me: many of Vietnamese people don’t really live in lower conditions than in people western countries (in fact, most of my cousins back home are richer than me); and despite the (in theory) lower living standard and moderate infrastucture of a third-world nation, Vietnam does have several advantages: bigger population (which means bigger market and bigger labor market), cheaper labor, less competition, etc. In theory, those conditions should encourage more people to open new companies, but in reality, very few people think of that. Why? Several answers come to my mind, but in the end, all of them are related to one point: Chances to fail. A typical young Vietnamese person with some job experience normally has to take care of not just himself/herself, but the whole family, which may include spouse, children, parents, grandparents, and even less-successful siblings. They don’t have the luxury to (temporarily) forgo their stable income and do something else, like open a company. Even if they have enough money (for the whole family) to live off for a while, they don’t know anywhere to get funding for their business ideas, except from borrowing from banks, friends and relatives. That makes openning startups very risky, as you can almost not do it a second time. One failed business is enough to put your life in hell with tons of debts.

That was not my intention to talk about macro economics here, but it’s just an example that helps clarifying my main point for this post: everybody talks about “grit” and “stick to it” as the key to success, but we don’t really talk about how to manage the potential failures. After all, there’s always a possibility of failures, and due to the survivorship bias, we only know stories of the winners, or people who failed (maybe repeatedly) but were able to try again and succeeded; we don’t normally hear from those who failed doing something and couldn’t recover from their failures.

There is this quote that we hear all the time (by Benjamin Franklin): “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”, which means that if you want successes, you should pay attention on preparation. I have always felt that this quote seems to unintendedly have made a bad impression on preparation for failures, while in fact, that should be a big part of the preparation in anything. Statistically speaking, the outcome that we get in the end of any process will be just one of the countless number of possible outcomes, and while we can try our best to minimize the risk, we can never get rid of the possibilities.

So, what advice do I want to say via this article? I really don’t know, risk management is a big topic that we can’t expect to be able to discuss in a few lines (and honestly, I am not that good in risk management to give anyone any advice), so this article is maybe simply a food for thought, which raises a topic that you may have not thought of. If you want any advice from me, I can only say those vague (and cliche) lines: Be prepared and have a backup plan. Hope for the best, but always prepare for the worst.

See you all next time!