The Failure Sweet Spot

It is said that the appropriate amount of failure for a child learning a new skill is 15%.

If a kid fails more or less than 15% of the time, they will develop their new skill slowly, or not at all.

Imagine a 10-year-old boy playing basketball against Lebron James and having every shot blocked and dribble stolen. He is failing nearly 100% of the time. Is he improving? No, hardly not.

On the other hand, if a kid fails less than 15%, they won’t improve their skills much either. Imagine the same 10-year-old boy now playing basketball against a toddler. The older kid will win 100% of the time with no challenge whatsoever and, again, won’t improve his basketball skills much at all.

A certain level of challenge is required to improve, and some say it should result in 15% failure, at least for a child. But let's look at failure from both angles, learning a new skill and maintaining an already established one.

Both factors, the level of challenge and the ability to retain information produce an ideal failure rate (the sweet spot). This is between 15-20%.

The level of challenge is as important for adults as it is kids. As much as we adults hate to fail, we need to. There is an appropriate amount of challenge and failure required to get smarter, better, faster, stronger, and to achieve greater results.

There is a quote I love about learning to snowboard: “If you’re not falling, you’re not trying.” But no one wants to fall a lot, myself included. It hurts. Still, the truth is that you need to experience the edge of your abilities in order to improve. If you're not falling or failing, at least sometimes, you're not trying hard enough.

To the expert, 15% seems like too much failure, I know. After all, failing 15% of the time as a police officer or firefighter would be unacceptable. Failing 15% as a pilot just wouldn't quite get the job done, would it? The most important jobs cannot afford to fail.

And in your own job, your career that you have worked so hard to preserve, what of it? Failing 15% would mean sucking at your job almost a full day of each week. You can't stomach that, I know. Neither can I. But as Randall Sutman said, "You're only as good at something as you're willing to be bad."

Failure looks different as we get older and we focus on mastering skills versus learning them. Sure, we need the same learning curve when we're first picking something up. We need to fall on our snowboard so we can learn to stay up. That's what keeps us young (or ages us quickly, depending on how hard you fall). We need to acquire fresh new skills and find a balance of making our practice too easy or too hard. We need to acquire new knowledge, knowing it won't click right away every time. Sure, as we age into old dogs, we tend to acquire less new tricks, but it's often the old tricks we need to keep mastering.

As the Ebbinhgaus Forgetting Curve shows, we might not be failing, but we are certainly forgetting. The graph depicts how we forget, have to re-learn, and forget again.

Thankfully, as the chart reveals, if we consistently practice - if our pursuit never ends - then we retain the skills and knowledge longer. The path to success is not only through failure but also consistency and determination. We forget and we fail. So what. If we keep trying, we get better. We have grit.

Whether you are cutting your teeth for the first time or you are refining a lifelong skill, you are probably interested in getting better faster. We all want the most out of life, and that means getting good at things, accruing knowledge, and finding wisdom.

Even when we've achieved mastery, we still need failure. It's part of the journey.

15-20% failure is the sweet spot.