Career Failure Can Be the Key to Success
New research has encouraging news for anyone who’s ever faced a professional setback
Everyone who’s spent time in the working world has a painful near-miss to point to. The promotion they thought was theirs, until it went to a coworker instead. The funding for a dream project that almost came through. The rejection call from the recruiter promising that it was so close, we really loved you, it just came down to you and one other candidate. For women and people of color especially, a career path is often filled with those moments.
But new research offers some support for the old adage espoused by thinkers from Nietzsche to Kelly Clarkson: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. A study out of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, published this month in Nature Communications, found that people who persist after suffering setbacks early in their professional lives are likely to not only succeed later on, but to surpass others who had early successes.
The study looked at early-career scientists going after high-profile grants, comparing those who had just made the cut to those who had just missed out on getting the money. When the authors looked at the young scientists’ trajectories over the following decade, they found a dramatic split: On the one…
