Imagine you are a scientist, testing whether a particular process will yield the result you anticipate. You do the first experiment, and the process does not, in fact, yield that result. Which of the following is an appropriate internal reaction to have?
A. “Time to record this information and move on to the next experiment.”
B. “I should adjust my experiments so that I’m more likely to get that result next time.”
C. “This process is bad and I should abandon it entirely.”
D. “I’m a bad scientist, and I definitely don’t belong here.”
That’s right, the correct answer is “A.” You know this. Yet many, many times people will take actions that align with the other three internal reactions, all the way to “D!”
I’ve seen it. Someone applies for one job in a new field. They get a rejection letter. Their reaction? “I guess I don’t belong in that field.”
A good scientist knows the true wisdom: “Data” is plural. You can’t make huge decisions from one result. You can’t take one failure and make it core to your identity. You need to make your failures atomic: small, isolated from the rest of your behaviors, and used for data collection.
You will fail. A bunch of times! If you let every one of them affect you in profound ways, your life will become warped beyond recognition.
Some resilience is always necessary to be a scientist. But the method works.
The Opportunity Machine 