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In 2015, researchers at the University of Southern California made a fascinating discovery. Not all mistakes activate the painful anterior insula. Sometimes they activate the pleasurable ventral striatum. What determines which area lights up? It turns out that when mistakes are combined with new learning, we experience them as rewarding. The wisdom we gain allows us to see new opportunities for avoiding mistakes and succeeding in the future. Turning negative feedback into corrective action is rewarding for another reason: it makes failure feel temporary.
Decoding Greatness
Ron Friedman
I was doing some consulting for a tech company that decided to let go of its top performer because she had a reputation for being “difficult.” She didn’t get along with everyone, they said; she pushed others too hard and often made people uncomfortable by insisting that everyone needed to do better. Someday maybe I’ll understand why that’s a bad thing; I’ll take difficult and effective over easy and incompetent any day. But there were ego and personality issues, probably because the pressure and tension were too high, and management decided it would be better for “morale” to let her go, along with her huge book of business and years of experience. And within a month of her departure, morale and productivity actually got worse, because those who had the issues with her suddenly had no one to blame for their poor performances, and no one to hold them accountable. And eventually, her former bosses realized that the person who was the “problem” was actually the one holding it all together. The “thorn” in everyone’s side was the most important part of the rose. A rose with thorns lives longer than a rose with the thorns clipped. When
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke eloquently about this phenomenon. “In a real sense, all of life is interrelated,” he said. “All persons are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”
Eleven Rings
Phil Jackson, Hugh Delehanty
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