As we get older we come to understand that we learn as much from our failures as our successes, but it doesn’t make us more eager to fail. What if it did?
I recently finished my first summer term teaching leadership courses with international students who come to the UCLA Anderson School of Management from around the world.
As happens every year, I learn more from my students than they do from me.
With the students from this summer, one of the things that stands out for me is their remarkable openness not only to learn, but to learn from being wrong. They were hungry to learn not only by succeeding, but by making mistakes.
If you sat in on one of my classes, you would quickly see that for almost all of the students, English not their native language, and many of them struggle to express themselves. But you would also notice that almost all of them throw themselves eagerly into unfamiliar course activities in an unfamiliar language.
Why?
One reason might be that challenging interpersonal interaction is a rare opportunity for them. For instance, a student pointed out to me that in her home country, the classroom learning opportunities are impersonal: “There are over one hundred people in the lecture halls. They don’t know who I am. They don’t know any of us. We’re a room full of faceless bodies. If a hundred different people showed up instead, they would never know the difference. I’m not a person to them. I’m a number.”
When it comes to education, there are certainly times and places for large-scale lectures, but I’m happy to have the opportunity to work in smaller groups and more interpersonally with these students, and perhaps that is a welcome novelty for some of them.
Another reason they are willing to try new things in a new country in an unfamiliar language—a reason I think is even more fundamental—is that most of them have not grown old enough to fear failure.
A rule of thumb I hold in mind from experience and observation is that past thirty years old, people tend to grow old or stay young. We either get more and more fixed in our ways, or we open ourselves more and more to new experiences.
To me it doesn’t come naturally to remain young at heart—I have to work on it. I’m grateful to get free reminders from my summer students, who at 18-24 years old are too young even to relate to my rule of thumb. My MBA students, who are 26-34 years old, can relate in a conceptual way. My Executive MBA students, who range in age into their 40s, understand instantly.
But back to my summer international students: They are still at the stage where a mistake interacting with others doesn’t mean failure. A mistake is as good as success because the important thing is to try, and then learn from whatever happens. Get it right, or get it wrong, either way you learn, so either way you win.
Here’s one example of something we did in class. Based on the native languages of the students, we all learned in several languages how to say: (1) hello; (2) how are you; and (3) take care; it was nice to see you.
We learned (i.e., I learned from them) how to say these things in the following languages: Dutch, French, Italian, German, Chinese (two dialects), Farsi, Spanish, Japanese, and Hindi. If my students were like me—rather self-conscious about looking ignorant and sounding stupid—no one would have even tried. But because they were eager to make mistakes on the way to gaining skill, we all came out ahead.
If you had the privilege of spending time with my students, one of the questions on your mind might be: What’s the next mistake that you want to make? Where are you as eager to fail as succeed because either option leaves you better off? If your experience is like mine, finding answers to these questions can help you learn something constructive and relate to younger generations more effectively. Perhaps best of all, when it comes to learning how to collaborate with different people from different , it can help you be a bit younger in spirit yourself.
Tot snel! Doei!
