The Art of Failure

Read at: http://www.infosurvey.com.my/The%20Art%20of%20Failure.pdf

I forget which book Gladwell talks about choking vs panicking, so most of this was familiar. But Gladwell is such an excellent writer I don't mind rereading.

“Human beings sometimes falter under pressure. Pilots crash and divers drown. Under the glare of competition, basketball players cannot find the basket and golfers cannot find the pin. When that happens, we say variously that people have “panicked” or, to use the sports colloquialism, “choked.” But what do those words mean? Both are pejoratives. To choke or panic is considered to be as bad as to quit. But are all forms of failure equal? And what do the forms in which we fail say about who we are and how we think? We live in an age obsessed with success, with documenting the myriad ways by which talented people overcome challenges and obstacles. There is as much to be learned, though, from documenting the myriad ways in which talented people sometimes fail.
“Choking” sounds like a vague and all-encompassing term, yet it describes a very specific kind of failure.”

Love that he then talks about implicit and explicit learning; “These two learning systems are quite separate, based in different parts of the brain.”

“Panic also causes what psychologists call perceptual narrowing.” It why we remind people on planes that exits may be behind them.

“Panic, in this sense, is the opposite of choking. Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct. They may look the same, but they are worlds apart.”

Yes! Stereotype threat is a type of ‘choking'.

“sometimes a poor performance reflects not the innate ability of the performer but the complexion of the audience; and that sometimes a poor test score is the sign not of a poor student but of a good one.”