Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Stephen Dubner is back with us now, author of the Freakonomics books and host of Freakonomics Radio, which we air on Sundays on WNYC. Stephen has a live Freakonomics event coming up at The Greene Space on Wednesday, and it's called How to Succeed at Failing. It's related to a three-part Freakonomics series on failure, which we try to succeed at talking about right now. Hi, Stephen. Always great to have you. Welcome back to Brian Lehrer Show.

Stephen Dubner: Thank you so much, Brian. It's great, great to be back with you.

Brian Lehrer: Okay, so I'll bite. Why a three-part series and Greene Space event about failure?

Stephen Dubner: Well, okay, first of all, it turned into a four-part series.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, sorry about that.

Stephen Dubner: No, no, no, it's not. I think we just kept expanding.

Brian Lehrer: Did the fourth one drop yet? I didn't see it.

Stephen Dubner: No. Let me think. The fourth one comes this coming Wednesday night. There are three available now.

Brian Lehrer: That's why I haven't seen it.

Stephen Dubner: Yes, exactly. Why on failing is a very good question. It depends who you ask that question to. You'll get very, very different answers about the meaning of failure. If you ask a philosopher, you'll get one answer. If you ask an anthropologist-- Ernest Becker famously wrote this book called The Denial of Death and he tied our fear of failure to our fear of death because every failure seems to be a signal of death of some kind.

If you ask someone in Silicon Valley, like especially on the venture capital side or the entrepreneur side, they say, "Failure is awesome. Failure is the stuff we chew up and get through on our way to world domination." Failure in that realm is a bit like its history in that it's written by the winners. If you go watch the eight million Ted Talks about the upsides of failure, you see a whole lot of ultimately successful people talking about how failure was awesome for them.

Now, that may be the case, but a lot of us fail all the time and it doesn't lead to awesome outcomes. We wanted to explore the entire spectrum of failure and acknowledge that when it's nothing but painful and brutal and hurtful and embarrassing and shameful and all those things, that there still is a way to learn from it. That means confronting it head on, and that's not such an attractive option, but there are a lot of systems and ways to do that.

In our series, we talk to a few people who I feel have done an amazing job of framing it in a way that you can turn this painful thing into something that can be at least potentially long-term productive. One of them is a scholar at Harvard Business School. She's an organizational psychologist named Amy Edmondson who came up with a spectrum of causes of failure, which means that every time you look at a given failure, you really examine the underlying causes and see how they can not only be prevented, but how you can learn from them and whether there were multiple causes.

Also, maybe it was a good failure. She has a spectrum that ranges from basically terrible to good. The terrible, she calls blameworthy. The good, she calls praiseworthy. On the far end, the praiseworthy side is experimentation. That's an underlying cause of failure. Well, experimentation is a fantastic thing. It's the core of the scientific method. Plainly, failure can be productive.

We also found, or she found us, I think, amazing- she's a medical anthropologist who teaches at Stephens Institute of Technology. She was so impressed or maybe depressed by how many of her students who've been straight-A students their whole lives-- Stephens is an amazing institution, and if you get in there to study engineering, you succeeded at school your whole life, and now they were so scared of failure. Even a B+ was a huge failure. Then there were some suicides on campus, and she thought that the way we look at failure is bad, and so she started teaching a course she calls Failure 101. I think it's kind of brilliant.

It took us three or four episodes to get all this, what I've tried to just blab on about for the past couple of minutes, tried to put it in story form that people can listen to and learn from.

Brian Lehrer: So many interesting things that you just said there, Stephen. We could spend many segments on many aspects of that.

Stephen Dubner: Let's do it. Let's do it.

Brian Lehrer: Well, one of them that jumped out at me from the beginning of your last answer was that the story of failure, really this glorification of failure that we've seen in the media, I think, for years and years now, comes from people who ultimately became successes. So the story of failure is written by the successes, which maybe doesn't do us ordinary people that much good.

Stephen Dubner: I agree. I also think it is very much connected to the other side of that coin, which you implied, which is what I call success porn, which is so much of not I wouldn't say the regular media, whether nonprofit or commercial media. I wouldn't say success porn is a huge part of that, but there is a success porn industry of, oh, gosh, podcasts, books, lectures.

Again, Ted talks. I don't mean to beat up on Ted talks, and look, I love books. I love lectures. I love all these things, but when you entice an entire population of people to listen to you or read to you and say, listen, if you just do these 18 things, then you too will be a blank billionaire, world beater, world-class scientist, whatever. You just look at a little bit of evidence and you find that's prima facia not true because there are a lot more readers of those books than there are very, very successful people.

This idea of mine about learning from failure goes back to something that I observed a long time ago when I was in graduate school here in New York City. I was studying writing, and it's a funny thing to study in school because it's not quite an academic topic, and this was a master's program. This is actually a fiction writing program, and so we read a lot of great writers. Then we did a lot of our own writing, and then we would bring our own writing into seminars where everyone would read every student's writing, and we'd discuss that as well.

What I observed and I'm not saying I'm right on this, but this was something that just I, as a writer, as a creative person, whatever, observed that resonated for me, because if you're a creative person, you can't listen to everybody else's rules all the time. You have to find what works for you, was that a lot of people, including me, would read the writers that everyone loved, and then we would basically try to emulate them.

Every seminar, you'd come in with the student writing and there would be a lot of short stories that sounded a lot like Ray Carver, and a lot of short novels that sounded a lot like Virginia Woolf, but the people writing them weren't Ray Carver and weren't Virginia Woolf. They had different life experiences, different abilities and so on. I found that trying to emulate success generally is not that fruitful, necessarily.

Obviously, there's some upside to it, but if you think about- you were talking about the Jets and Giants earlier. If I want to be a football player, do I try to emulate the most successful person at my position? Maybe, if it means technique and strategy and so on, but if it means life story and gestalt and philosophy, maybe not, because that's the beauty about humans. We're all different. What I found in graduate school is that when I would read other students writing and I thought it wasn't working, if it was boring or pretentious or just confusing, I could see those failures so easily in their writing in a way that I couldn't in my own. It's just a perspective issue.

I found that observing, I don't want to call it failed writing, but observing flaws was hugely beneficial. That, to me, was a bedrock component of the idea that learning from failure is real and it shouldn't be discounted, and then we need to figure out more fruitful ways to do it.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we've got about five minutes left in this segment with Stephen Dubner from Freakonomics and Freakonomics Radio. Does anybody have a short but really good story about a failure of your own and what you learned from it? Or a question about learning from failure or coping with failure? Because we don't always learn from failure and then go on to be a big success at that or at something else. Learning from failure or coping with failure. Who's got a story that's brief, or who's got a question? 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692.

After I failed to state the correct number of parts in Stephen's series about failure, it's four, not three, and he's got a Greene Space event coming up Wednesday at seven o'clock on the topic. Tell me one of these stories. One is about a person you call the Edison of Medicine. Who is that?

Stephen Dubner: Who was the Edison of Medicine?

Brian Lehrer: I think this is the person working on the mRNA vaccine. Is that right?

Stephen Dubner: Oh, Bob Langer. Oh, my goodness, yes. Bob Langer. Oh, gosh. He needs to have books written about him. Bob Langer is a biochemical researcher. He's now in the realm of biotech. He's considered one of the giants. He has done basic and advanced research for a million years now, that has affected all of us in a number of positive ways.

Most recently, he was involved in the establishment of Maderna, so that was one of the many companies that he's helped co-found, or at least Inspire. If you go back, what he did was,-- Just think about how much we take for granted now. You have a headache, you take a pill, your headache usually goes away. We don't think about what's in the pill, and how it actually gets into our bloodstream, and what it does, and how it does what it does.

Bob was a person who wanted to figure out how to get larger molecules distributed more equally over space and time in the bloodstream. That was a feat of biochemical engineering that everyone told him was impossible. The reason he didn't buy it was because he was a very hard worker, but he wasn't great in the library. He didn't like to read the stories of failure.

Related to that, if I may, quickly, I'll say, here's another big problem about failure. Because we're so scared of it and embarrassed by it, we hide it. When you hide failures, especially as a scientist, but any kind of person, when you hide your failure, what you do is you deprive the rest of the world from knowing what won't work the next time. and so yet another reason to do it. Anyway, Bob Langer at MIT is someone that should be admired and applauded.

Brian Lehrer: Let's see. I think Herschel in Morristown might have a story for us. Hi, Herschel.

Herschel: Hello.

Brian Lehrer: Go for it.

Herschel: Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Herschel: I'm in college, and my dad was a chemist, and so I thought I was going to be a chemist, and I was taking a class in chemistry with a guy, a friend of mine, who was really, really smart and I was failing this class. My friend was trying to help me, but it really was no good and I was spending all of my time studying chemistry. Meanwhile, we shared another class in computer science. My friend was not getting the computer classes at all.

There came a time when I had a final exam in chemistry, and a final project in computers. I completely blew off my computer project to study chemistry. I went into the computer lab at the last minute, everybody else had been working for weeks on their program, and I finished my program in about 10 hours in a cram session in the computer lab, after I took the chemistry exam.

Brian Lehrer: What's the moral of the story real quick?

Herschel: Well, I got an F on the chemistry exam, and the professor told me I really was never going to be a chemist. Then I got an A on the computer project and the professor begged me to change my major to computer science. It taught me that there's a difference between never giving up and knowing when to quit.

Brian Lehrer: That is a great story. Herschel, thank you. In fact, it's the theme of one of your episodes, right, called Grit Versus Quit.

Stephen Dubner: It's true. Years and years ago, the first or second year we started making Freakonomics Radio, so 10 or 12 years ago. We made an episode called The Upside of Quitting. It remains probably the episode that we've gotten the most mail, email about over the years because people are so conditioned to not quit things because quitting appears to be a failure. There are all these amazing people from history who told us, Churchill, "Never give in, never in anything large or petty." Vince Lombardi, "A winner never quits, and a quitter never wins," although I don't think that originated with Lombardi.

It's been culturally normed to never quit. I am a huge quitter, Brian. I have quit so many things, mostly professionally in my life because economists have what's called opportunity costs. If you're spending $1 or an hour on something, you can't spend that hour or $1 on something else. Proactive quitting is a big part of that. Herschel, I'm really glad that worked out.

It also says something to talent, like don't ignore what you are great at because most of us if we're lucky, we're pretty good or great at one or two things. There are a few freaks of nature. If you can focus on finding what you're truly good at, you're much--

Here's the thing; if you find what you love, love, love to do, there's a good chance you'll be good at it because you will just do it, and do it, and do it, like Herschel in the computer lab. He only did 10 hours but that 10 hours was built on 1,000 hours because he loved it.

Brian Lehrer: There you go. Let me get one more in here. Patty in Merrick, you're on WNYC. Hi, Patty. We've only got about 30 seconds for you, but go for it.

Patty: Okay, thank you. I wanted to respond to the story about looking at the graduate students' work and being able to see your own mistakes. It reminded me of my experience in12-step programs. That's AA programs and similar ones. When I can see other people and I hear other people's stories about the mistakes that they make, that is so much more powerful [unintelligible 00:15:30] very often than the stories of their successes because I can see myself in that. I can see their mistake and it helps me to see my mistakes.

Brian Lehrer: Beautifully said, Patty. Beautiful, thank you very much. That's a good point on which to end Stephen, you can comment on that briefly if you want. I'll tell- [crosstalk] go ahead. No, you do that.

Stephen Dubner: My comment [unintelligible 00:15:51] perfect. That's it. It's a really good observation. Yes, beautiful.

Brian Lehrer: Stephen Dubner has a Freakonomics Greene Space event all about this on Wednesday night. You and some of the people that you were talking about, who you were citing at the beginning of the segment will be joining you. Listeners, seven o'clock with Stephen Dubner host of Freakonomics Radio, and author of the Freakonomics books on an event, for an event talking about failure, and its joys and coping mechanisms, I guess, Wednesday at 7:00 at the Greene Space. Stephen, thanks for previewing it with us.

Stephen Dubner: Brian, thank you. I just want to say you do great work every day, so thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you so much. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. More yet to come.

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