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2023-2024 MS2 English Language

News Commentary 4 Due date: _________________
Name: ______________________ Class: MS2__ ( ) Group: Date: ______________

Topic: Resilience

The learning opportunities hiding 🡨 Read the

article

in our failures By Christian Jarrett, Features correspondent

Failure is often seen as a source of shame. But if we studied and shared our
failures, we could learn a lot from them.

Successes enjoy more attention than failures. We celebrate stories of triumph, and pore over
them to extract the reasons why things went so well. Industries package the lessons and share
them as tips for ‘best practice’, while after-dinner speakers regale their audiences with the
steps they took to glory. By contrast, if they’re not buried completely, failures, and those who
🡨 Highlight
perpetrate them, are more often seen as sources of shame or ignominy.
/Underline
the selected
Yet it is often the errors, missteps and outright flops that contain more useful practical vocabulary
information on how to do things better, if only we were more willing to share and study them.
That’s according to Ayelet Fishbach and Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, psychologists at the Booth
School of Business at the University of Chicago.

The pair believes that we often fail to learn sufficiently from when things go wrong. “Take
bad business decisions, which we make because we don’t learn from others’ and our own
failures. We similarly often ignore signs that our relationships aren’t going well or that our
boss is unpleased with our performance. We don’t code [pay attention to] failures and don’t
bother to learn the lesson for how to succeed,” says Fishbach.

Reluctance to share

Previous research had already exposed our unhelpful aversion to information about ongoing
or future failure – a problem dubbed ‘the ostrich effect’ by University of Sheffield
psychologist Thomas Webb and his colleagues. Whether we’re trying a new fitness regime,
building a company website or planning for a looming pandemic, the human inclination is to
put our heads in the sand once we’ve embarked on our path. Rather than monitoring our
progress to check if we’ve gone off track, we grit our teeth, continue and hope for the best.

We also tend to neglect imagining what might go wrong when we look ahead toward
attaining a goal, as research by psychologist Gabriele Oettingen at New York University and
the University of Hamburg has shown. Yet when people are prompted to engage in ‘mental

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contrasting’ – anticipating the obstacles along the way to attaining their goal – they are more
likely to persevere and succeed in their aims.

Now Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach have added to this literature by focusing on our
reluctance to pay attention to failures – both our own and others – after they’ve happened. In
their recent paper, the researchers asked dozens of teachers to recall a specific time they’d
been successful at work and a specific time that they’d failed. When they asked the teachers
which story they’d choose to share to help other teachers, nearly 70% opted to share their
success rather than their failure.

‘Pay extra attention’

The new findings suggest many of us could benefit from simply being made more aware of
the lessons hidden in our failures.

“In the wake of failure, ask, ‘What have I learned? How can I make this lesson useful in the
future?’” advises Fishbach. She adds that it can be hard to learn from failures because they
hurt your self-esteem, and you need to infer the correct answer or a more advantageous way
of doing things. “So not only [do] you need to pay attention; you need to pay extra attention
because it’s harder to learn from failure,” she says.

It also helps to lay the groundwork earlier, before you even embark on your work project or
personal goal. Oettingen’s research on mental contrasting, in which people are prompted to
imagine having reached their goal and then to anticipate the obstacles on the way, has shown
that performing this exercise at the outset encourages people to be more receptive to negative
feedback later on.

“Not only is failure feedback more readily embraced, but it’s also integrated in [the person’s]
plans to reach the wish and to actually fulfil the wish,” explains Oettingen. It’s as if
anticipating the ways that things could go wrong makes us more receptive to learning from
our errors and failures when they inevitably occur. “It’s not only that they’ve kind of
processed the information, but they’ve used that information in order to be more successful,”
she says.

Of course, thinking about your errors and failures can be demotivating, especially if you are a
perfectionist or feeling low in confidence. To face up to your mistakes and learn from them,
it’s important not to be overly harsh on yourself.

Thomas Webb, of the ‘ostrich effect’ phenomenon, is currently part of a team at Sheffield
University researching this very issue, including working with organisations to look at ways
to help people overcome failure through self-compassion. His team will be working with a
gym, a parenting organisation and a journal publishing company – in the last case, helping
reviewers of papers to overcome their common tendency to procrastinate.

“The basic hypothesis is that many people are critical of themselves when they lapse or
experience challenges,” Webb says, “but if they were able to respond with self-compassion,

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for example by recognising that failure is a natural part of being human, then it is possible to
maintain motivation and efforts [in the face of failure] … part of this will be a cultural shift
toward accepting apparent failure.”

Positive trend?

Webb is right that there are broader cultural lessons here. While we quite rightly see failures
as a negative, we have much to gain from a wider shift that reframes them not just as sources
of shame or regret, but also as richly informative learning opportunities.

Some industries in which safety is a number-one priority, such as aviation or space travel,
already have this mentality – but, arguably, it’s an attitude that needs to be spread more
widely.

There are positive signs this is starting in some organisations. “I’m fascinated by a growing
trend of companies holding ‘screw-up nights’,” says Fishbach. “They’re essentially
consequence-free opportunities for employees to step up to the mic and talk about the
mistakes they’ve made on the job.”

It takes courage to admit when you got things wrong, but if more of us could do it, we would
all benefit from the lessons learned.

(Source: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200616-the-learning-opportunities-hiding-in-our-failures)

New words: (Highlight/Underline the selected vocabulary items in the article) 🡨 Record
Word/Phrase/Idiom Part of Speech, Meaning (Sample Sentence) new words
(C/U/T/I)
public embarrassment
e.g. ignominy Noun, [U] (The team experienced the ignominy of total defeat in the last
sporting event.)
adj. open and direct
(You should probably tell your parents about your
outright outright feelings if you feel depressed or moody.)

v. entertain or amuse someone when talking

(A comedian’s job is to regale the audience by
regale telling funny jokes to them.)

n. basic work
(Before mastering football, you will have to learn
groundwork the groundwork and build up your skills on it.)

v. to end sth.
(Our friendship lapsed since he told my biggest
lapse secret to the public.)

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 n. feeling of dislike and/or unwillingness to do sth.
(I tend to have an aversion to studying whenever I
aversion feel tired.)

[U]:uncountable noun, [C]:countable noun [T]:transitive verb, [I]: intransitive verb

A transitive verb is one that takes an object after it.
An intransitive verb is one that does not take an object after it.

After reading the article above, you feel that young people should be more aware of the learning
opportunities brought forth by failures. Write a short article for the next issue of the school magazine
to encourage greater appreciation of failures. Give at least two pieces of advice on how to take
advantage of setbacks in life. (150-200 words)
Failures: A Part of Everyone’s Life

Have you ever experienced failures or setbacks in certain things that made you feel sad for a
whole day? After reading the article ‘The learning opportunities hiding in our failures’ by Christian
Jarrett, I feel that young people should be more aware of the learning opportunities brought forth by such
failures. If we studied and shared our failures, we could learn a lot from them. Though you may ask
‘How can I take advantage of setbacks in life?’ Below is some advice on this topic.

First of all, we should practice self-reflection and learn from failures. Spare about 15 minutes
when you face setbacks or challenges to reflect on what you’ve done wrong or what is the problem you
are currently facing. Understanding what has led to your failure is a part of improvement. After
self-reflecting, improvise and make changes on your mistakes and use the failure as an experience and
opportunity to gain knowledge. Self-reflection is undoubtedly a habit that we should practice once we
face failures or setbacks.

Secondly, you can seek support or guidance from people around you. Your parents, friends, and
teachers are mentors in your life. Don’t be hesitant to ask for support from others. A different perspective
from others can provide you with a different insight on what you’ve done wrong. You can then improve
from the mistakes and take the perspectives from others as advantage for improving.

All in all, failures can bring learning opportunities to people. By utilizing the ways of taking
advantage of setbacks, we, as human beings, can improve not just for ourselves, but also for our society. I
hope the advice mentioned above could help every one of you to take advantage of failures and setbacks.
We should always appreciate failures as they are a part of our daily life.

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 New words Language & Organisation Reflection
4 -- -- □ Comprehensive analysis with
original and meticulously crafted ideas
3 □ Vocabulary is appropriate. Language □ Well-organised and well-presented □ Relevant information and ideas are
patterns are accurate and appropriate work with excellent language used clearly expressed and developed
2 □ Vocabulary is appropriate. Language □ Fairly well-organised and □ Some ideas and information are
patterns are mostly accurate and well-presented work with fair relevant and expressed clearly
appropriate language used
1 □ Vocabulary is inappropriate. Language □ Ineffective organisation with simple □ Basic relevant information is offered
patterns are inaccurate and inappropriate language used

Total: /10

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