Fail, adapt, thrive for life

Manu Kapur (00:0) The more we learn through failure, the more we embody and embrace it in different aspects. Over time we develop the capabilities that even though a curveball comes and we will feel bad and you allow yourself to feel bad, I have the knowledge that I will be able to get through this.

Peter Bowes (00:21) So why do we fail? Oftentimes we have aspirations to live a healthier life, take more exercise, eat a better diet, but something along the way goes wrong. Hello again, I’m Peter Bowes. This is the Live Long podcast where we explore the science and stories behind human longevity. Manu Kapur is an expert on learning from failure. He is a professor of learning sciences and higher education at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and his book is Productive Failure Unlocking Deeper Learning Through the Science of Failing. Manu, it’s good to talk to you.

Manu Kapur (01:00) Thank you having me, Peter.

Peter Bowes (01:03) Let me ask you right at the top, what makes you an expert in this subject?

Manu Kapur (01:07) Well, the dots connect looking back, so much of my journey throughout the years has been dotted with one failure after another, starting from… Yeah, and through some meandering and some luck, I’ve ended up becoming a researcher on human cognition and learning. And that just brought me to the idea of failure as a central mechanism for how we learn and grow.

Peter Bowes (01:29) You wanted to be a soccer player, but it didn’t turn out.

Manu Kapur (01:32) That’s true, I trained to become a professional football player and after four knee surgeries, which often happens in football, and a full ACL reconstruction, it was time to give that dream up.

Peter Bowes (01:46)

So where did your, just backtrack a little bit in terms of your academic career, once you perhaps given up those aspirations or maybe it was forced upon you to be a professional football player, where did you go? What did you do?

Manu Kapur (01:58) Yeah. Well after that my plan B was to finish up my engineering degree, my bachelor’s in engineering course, but by the time I finished that up I was pretty sure that engineering was not for me, at least not at that time. And that was then the time of the dot-com boom of the late 90s and I went into the startup world and very quickly dot-com boom became dot-com doom, so they crashed. And then I joined industry for a while, didn’t particularly like it well in a management consulting firm. And then a chance to teach. I was literally broke. And a chance to teach kids mathematics came up in a low-income neighborhood school. And I took that up, not for the best of intentions of teaching, but more to just survive. But because I like math, I thought that might be a good choice. And as I did that, I just became interested in mathematical cognition. So the idea of how do we come to understand something as abstract as mathematics, because it’s very hard for people. And then that, with some luck, with a scholarship and such, ended up with a master’s and a PhD in education and learning sciences. And yeah, many, like I said, many failures along the way, but with some luck and preparation, I am where I am.

Peter Bowes (03:17) But apart from your own failures, which you mentioned there, how did that academic career and that interest in mathematics focus in on trying to understand what failure is and to use it to an advantage?

Manu Kapur (03:31) Yeah, so I think the fundamental idea was that we all say we can learn from failure when it happens. We can learn from our mistakes when they happen. And I realized that if failure is a compelling learning mechanism, it’s so intuitive that we can learn from failure, at least some of us, then why do we wait for failure to happen? And alongside this there was a lot of research suggesting that when you learn something new, if you’re just told that thing, it is not the most optimal way of learning because then you do not know exactly, the deep understanding is not there. So what would be the alternative? And so I married those two and said, okay, perhaps the starting point of learning should not be the telling of the instruction, it should be a preparation and if it’s driven through failure, so in other words, I engage you in problem solving activity that are designed for you to generate multiple ideas and solutions and representations and strategies and approaches, but it is designed in a way that you will not get to the correct answer. And then you follow it up with actual telling or instruction. So it’s a combination of both the initial failure driven exploration followed by instruction and then the rest is basically empirical work where experiments after experiments have shown how and why it is effective.

Peter Bowes (04:54) The word failure is inherently negative, isn’t it? But the whole ethos of what you’re talking about is turning that around and making it a positive.

Manu Kapur (05:04) Yeah, I mean the word failure is inherently negative because we give it a negative rep. An example I like to give is if you think about the steepest learning years of your life. They are your early childhood, early years in your life, the first five, six, seven years of your life. Those are your steepest learning curves and we know that from research too. And what is the underlying mechanism there? If a child tries to do something, oftentimes in the first instance, or in the many instances that follow, they can’t. Whether you’re learning language, learning words, trying to make sense of what the world around you is, learning how to walk or crawl you know, failure is at the heart of everything that we do initially. We don’t think of it as bad as children. In fact, we probably don’t even think about it. just, you you try, you don’t succeed. You just try again and again and again. And with some support and with experts or adults around, you slowly, through failure, multiple failures, learn the correct thing or the correct way or the optimal way of either walking or speaking or so on and so forth. So, to me, failure is the basic mechanism that we are built with to exploit. And we very comfortable with it to begin with. We don’t question it. I think the reason why failure gets a bad rep or it gets a bad connotation is that throughout the schooling and the adult years, we are inculturated or socialized in a very different way to suppress that basic disposition and mechanism that we have, a very powerful mechanism that we have. And that’s the thing that we’re trying to re-norm in Productive Failure. It’s to say, recognize the power, we have it in us, we’ve been socialized otherwise, now let’s re-norm it and reuse it in a way that we can learn deeply even as schooling students and adults.

Peter Bowes (06:54) I want to try to dig a little deeper and apply it to what we talk about on this podcast. And that is really aspiring to the kind of science proven, science driven lifestyle as it applies to our exercise and nutrition and how often we sleep, how long we sleep for, how many social connections we have, all these things that go into living as well as we can. So I want to try to apply what you do to that. I just want to first, I’m just curious, do we all have to fail? If we were the perfect human being and we never failed, would we suffer from that? So in other words, failure is part of us. We have to experience it to learn from it.

Manu Kapur (07:32)

Yeah, anytime you’re trying to build any new capability, whether it’s capability and knowledge or skills or strength or stamina or just general health as you say, right? I mean, as long as you’re building new capability, the adage, no pain, no gain. I mean, you’re basically entering a zone where your current capabilities are not quite sufficient to take on that challenge. So initially, whether you’re learning something new or you’re going on a healthy sort of regimen exercising, exercise regimen, chances are you’re entering a zone where you’re currently not capable to maintain that or do that successfully and to recognize that that is normal is the first step. Most people think that that because they were not able to initially do something successfully that that’s bad maybe it’s not for them but to recognize that entering that zone is predicated on failure right, because the failure is the information you need to say, now I’m in that zone. And then in that zone you will struggle and there will be more failure as you go along. If you know that and then find ways to support people when they’re in that zone, that’s when failure becomes productive.

Peter Bowes (08:49) So as we apply that to, let’s say a new exercise regime, it might be to walk two miles a day, something relatively modest. And it starts off great, but after a week, it gets down to a mile a day. And then maybe after three weeks, it’s a mile every other day. And that initial goal, that initial aspiration is beginning to… to fizzle and you acknowledge it. You know that you’re failing in your initial goal. based on your research and your science, what is the thought process that you go through from that point acknowledging that you’re not achieving what you set out to do?

Manu Kapur (09:25) Well, I think in that in that place I think there’s the goal should be set higher so you need to move the goalpost a little because that’s how growth happens is you set a goal and you’re in that zone and over time you become fluent in that goal so walking for two miles is no longer a problem for example so that’s case A where it is not a problem and then you become fluent and then you get bored with it so chances are you need some variation you need to change up a little bit or just set higher goals or increase the difficulty of that. The other thing could be that maybe that goal was too high to begin with, right, and that’s the other possibility, in which case you need to shift the goalposts down a little bit, start with smaller steps and become fluent in those and then you notch it up from there. So those are the two possibilities. Recognize which possibilities you’re in. Many times we fail because we set too high a goal. So it’s like if you’re going to read, if you’re going to start reading a book, that’s 200 pages. But if you say I’m going to read just two pages a day, and the two pages become four and four become eight and so on and so forth.

Peter Bowes (10:38) How important is it to have a mental vision of what you’re trying to achieve? So you might set out on this exercise regime because you want to be able to do something in a certain time or you want to physically change the way you look or physically change your blood tests and your biomarkers and be physically healthier as a result of what you’re doing. Does that vision of what it could be play into whether you fail or not?

Manu Kapur (11:05) Yeah, think that it does…as long as you don’t let it interfere with your growth because if you start looking at the vision as the goalpost or the goal and then because then you will see we love to compare right so if our goal was to lose twenty pounds and in the first week we haven’t gotten anywhere that’s a massive failure but if in the first week our vision is twenty pounds over six months and the expectation in the first week maybe I’ll just maintain my weight and not grow. And I think it’s breaking the vision down into manageable, sustainable chunks is what sets us up for both failure and success.

Peter Bowes (12:03) How does your work, how does your mathematics expertise play into this? What is the science behind what you’re saying?

Manu Kapur (12:05) Yeah, my science is basically human cognition, but some of those underlying mechanisms for why failure-driven learning actually works so powerful maybe can be extrapolated, but as a scientist I won’t do it, but I’ll leave you two and your audience to actually extrapolate. But in the context of at least learning and growth. There are four mechanisms that are at play. I call them the four A’s of learning and growth. And these are activation, awareness, affect, and assembly. And so activation is the idea that if you’re trying to learn something new and I can activate relevant knowledge that you have that could be used to learn that new thing, then that helps you learn that new thing. If I start speaking in a language that you do not know at all, then no matter how clearly I explain it, anything you’re not going to understand. But if I activate your priors, then I think I’m setting you up in a nice way. Failure helps that activation process really well because you try something, it doesn’t work, then you try something else and it doesn’t work and you try something else and it doesn’t work. It’s activating all the priors that are needed for you to then learn that correct thing or the optimal thing later on. So you need to activate the resources that people bring. And this applies both in cognition and also motor learning, so in exercising as well. We need to activate relevant resources that people bring to the table. Because with that activation, what that does is it builds an awareness of a gap. I tried something and I could not. I tried many ways, so I know what is it that I can do, here is my capability and knowledge, but there’s a gap, awareness of a gap. And that awareness of a gap is a very strong mechanism for learning. That’s exactly right. Because that builds affect. And by affect I mean interest in closing that gap, motivation to close that gap, engagement in finding out how to close that gap, but also a set of emotions because you’re frustrated, it’s painful to be in that zone where you tried many things and they didn’t work out. And so it creates this set of motivation, interest, engagement and positive and negative emotions. It’s a roller coaster. And our studies have shown that, you know, we tend to think that positive emotions are positively correlated with learning and growth, and negative emotions are negatively correlated. But it turns out some negative emotions are actually positively correlated with learning and vice versa. As long as we do it in a safe way, in a psychologically, physically secure and safe space, I think some level of negative emotions, frustration, anxiety can actually be very productive for learning in Rome. So if you have your system activated, you have an awareness of a gap and you have this affective state of all these variables that is very strongly charged, if at that point in time an expert or a teacher or an adult comes and assembles the knowledge for you, shows you how to do it, and that assembly is then what makes it all productive.

Peter Bowes (15:17) Once you feel as if you’re beginning to master the art of learning from failure in one area of your life, let’s say we’ve talked about exercise and you see yourself making progress and you’re reaching your goals and you’re living a better life. Is that skill transferable to other aspirations that you have in your life? It could be academic, could be nutrition, it could be…family, could be friends, could be any other aspect of living that isn’t directly linked to the first thing you tried and that was getting better exercise. Do you learn those skills and therefore it becomes part of you that you can assess a situation and learn from it faster in the future?

Manu Kapur (15:58) Great question. This transfer is the holy grail of learning and growth and the short answer to that question it spontaneously does not happen. But if you’re intentional about it about transferring what you’ve learned in one domain to the other, then chances are that it will transfer. And then if you then transfer it to other, yet more domains, then it really gets part of who you are. That’s the highest form of, we call it identity transformation. Like you change who you are because you have these very high level contextualized skills in these different domains. So yes, it can transfer, but not spontaneously. You have to be very intentional about it.

Peter Bowes (16:37) Interesting. And I’m wondering about unexpected setbacks. You might think you’re on an even keel, you’re kind of mastering, as I say, the art of learning from failure. And then something left field, something out of the blue happens. Maybe it’s a physical injury or maybe it’s a family issue you’re dealing with, but it’s something unrelated to the main focus of your activity. How do you deal with that and how can you draw on your learning process in terms of learning from failure because this is an aspect of your life that is perhaps going to result in failure but it isn’t something you’d initially thought about.

Manu Kapur (17:14) Yeah, mean luck plays a huge role in life, right? I mean, just the birth lottery is the biggest luck that one could have, right? I mean, other things and other economists and sociologists have actually studied this. The first time it happened, I mean, for me, for example, the first major thing, time it happened was the knee injuries that derailed my aspirations. It was terrible. It was very hard. I mean, I was depressed for a very long time had no kind of, life had not prepared me with the tool kits to deal with that. But the thing is that the more we learn through failure, the more we embody and embrace it in different aspects. Over time we develop the capabilities that even though curveball comes and we will feel bad and you allow yourself to feel bad, I have the knowledge that I will be able to get through this, which is not something that I had in the first or the second instances when this curveball came in my life. And that’s the only way that I can sort of kind of rationalize it. It is random. It is luck on the one hand, but there are toolkits too. You can develop the toolkits to handle it, deal through it.

Peter Bowes (18:25)To what extent can we learn through the failures of other people? We all watch friends, family members, again, they might launch into an exercise program or a new nutrition program, new way of eating, and you can almost see the car crash happening because you can see them failing. And then maybe you want to embark on something similar yourself. Do we have it within us to learn from the failures that we see all around us?

Manu Kapur (18:54) Yeah. Yes, I call it learning from vicarious failures. And there’s a saying, smart people learn from their own failures, but wise people can learn from other people’s failures. And obviously the proportion of wisdom versus smart is very low, so there are fewer wise people than there are smart people, which means learning from other people’s failures is possible, but it’s not easy. There’s something about your own experience and your own failure that drives learning in deep ways that learning from others is just not the same. Not that it’s not possible is just not the same depth of learning and we found that in our experiments on learning mathematics as well. If you try to solve a problem and you fail in a number of ways to solve the problem and then you learn the correct one versus I give you those suboptimal ways of like I show you, here’s how people try to solve the problem, just try to see, to study other people’s failures and then I’ll teach you what the correct one is and we compared this and we found that now learning from your own failures is more powerful, more deeper than learning from other people’s failures.

Peter Bowes (20:16) I’m just curious, what sort of reception do you get when you talk about these issues publicly? You’ve written about it clearly, but I’m just thinking and broadening this out. We live in a very chaotic world at the moment. Global geopolitics is all over the place right now. There’s a lot of failure happening and lot of failure has happened in recent years and months. And I was wondering…In terms of general populations, how much understanding is there of learning from failure and seeing failure as a positive and crucially not repeating those failures?

Manu Kapur (20:52) Yeah, I think increasingly there is a greater sensitivity to it. You see it as a need, almost as one of the capabilities that people should develop as part of their education and learning and growth. Was it like this 20 years ago? No, and even before. I think we, at least in the developed, in the first world societies, people have come to live in very safe societies where failure is not the norm, where uncertainty is low, things are predictable, things are certain, things are safe. I grew up in India where things are not exactly like that. Things are more chaotic, not predictable. And, you know, in a way you can say, yes, I didn’t have as good early childhood years growing up in that level of uncertainty and predictability but it also trains you well to deal with unpredictability and uncertainty. And that’s what in very safe way we’re trying to do with programs like productive failure is to design for uncertainty, design for failure, design for unpredictability in the safe way so that you develop these capabilities. And I think that’s the argument that now is hitting the hammer on the nails head. That’s what people are trying to say. yeah, I get this now. You’re fighting failure with failure. If we never learn if we never experience failure, how do we learn? How will we deal with it when we have it? If we never experience uncertainty or unpredictability, how can we ever deal with it? It can be very debilitating. again, fighting failure with failure is probably a good argument that connects with people now.

Peter Bowes (22:36) Yeah, and actually that comes back to really one of my first thoughts and my first questions. And you say people, at least some people are living in safer societies, cleaner societies, where perhaps there is, in terms of everyday living, less failure, but that that necessarily isn’t a good thing. It’s like living with a very, very clean diet that actually some you know, aspects of rough living can be beneficial for us. Getting vegetables out of the garden and maybe consume a little bit of dirt might actually be good for our digestive system.

Manu Kapur (23:11) Exactly, that’s what we call it the Indian stomach Peter. So my first 15-16 years of my life were in food in India and yes, much as my parents tried to give it as clean and as healthy environment, it’s India, At least India of that time. And so I often joke that I have a stronger stomach purely because I lived in India. I grew up in India.

Peter Bowes (23:35) Building on your research and your book and your many years of looking into this subject, what are your aspirations for the future, perhaps in terms of spreading the message and the knowledge that you’ve gleaned? But do you have any particular goals in mind?

Manu Kapur (23:51) Yes, so you know this first book came out of a TED talk that I gave on productive failure and was focused entirely on learning and growth. And so this book focuses entirely on learning. five years or a couple of years later, in 2024, I gave my second TED talk, which basically rose around the conversations where people said, oh, have you thought about failure? mean, a conversation like you in health. Somebody said, oh, in physical training and strength training, have you thought about it in biology? Have you talked about it, you talked psychotherapy, in engineering, in design, in entrepreneurship. So you start having all of these very interesting conversations which are not the domain of focus for you, for me at least in the beginning. But then you start to see that actually productive failure, not just failure, but productive failure is a thread that runs through many of these different domains. In strikingly similar dynamics unfold, whether you’re talking about biology to engineering design or to how we science operates as an enterprise and that is very fascinating so one of the goals I have over the next few years is for me to consolidate this wider body of knowledge and analysis and show that failure is the common thread that runs through it.

Peter Bowes (35:13) That’s interesting. do you have, this is a podcast about aspiring to a great healthspan, the number of years that we enjoy life without chronic disease. Do you have your own aspirations in that respect? And maybe you can draw on your knowledge to try to achieve them.

Manu Kapur (25:29) Yeah, I I’ve tried, I’m uniquely aware that, you know, I’m a Singaporean and in Singapore the the lifespan is 84 but the health span is 74. So there’s a long gap and that’s a chronic and I hope I want to be able to, you know, avoid that or minimize that, the last leg to be as short as possible. And yeah, so I constantly think about, I’m surrounded by health scientists by the way in my work. I direct the Singapore-ETH Center and I learned lots from the techniques and the technologies that are in place and really the goal is to improve healthspan and exercise, stress, sleep, nutrition and there was one more thing that I forget but there are like five basic markers or five basic things that you need to orchestrate again in small ways and if you can do that then that improves healthspan.

Peter Bowes (26:24) Yeah, I think the one that you probably didn’t mention there was certainly that I talk about a lot is social connections. 

Manu Kapur (26:28) Social, yes you’re right, sorry, yeah, social connections. And that’s related to stress as well, right? I mean, it kind of helps you manage your stress levels. Yeah, you’re absolutely right.

Peter Bowes (26:37) And I guess social connections and friendships, there’s failure there as well, isn’t there, that we can learn from in terms of the people that we associate with.

Manu Kapur (26:45) Exactly, and people come and go and some people stay throughout, other people come and go in our lives, some friendships work, some don’t, and we learn from it.

Peter Bowes (26:52) I guess a skill is identifying a difficult relationship or a unproductive relationship or a unhelpful relationship. Identifying it fairly quickly and acknowledging it and doing something about it.

Manu Kapur (27:06) Yeah, there from a psychological standpoint we know we’re terrible at it. We tend to hang on to our sunk costs, the losses or things that are not made in friendships, relationships, work and so on. We tend to stick to those longer than we should. And if we have that knowledge that we tend to do that, perhaps that can moderate our impulses to do so.

Peter Bowes (27:29) Manu, this has been a fascinating conversation, a lot to think about. And I think that’s the whole point of what you’re doing, that you make people think about these issues. Thank you so much.

Manu Kapur (27:40) Thank you Peter, I had a good time as well. Thank you.