Emily McDonald explains that the brain learns most effectively through mistakes, so seeking out challenges and failures actually strengthens learning and creativity. Avoiding failure becomes self-sabotaging because it prevents the experiences that drive growth.
Neuroscience shows that the best way to increase your success rate is to increase your failure rate. And I know that sounds backward because we spend our entire lives trying to avoid failure, and we might not even give something our all because of what it might mean about us if we don't try as hard as we can. But this is a form of self-sabotage because the brain actually learns through making errors. And the more we spend our lives designing our entire lives around avoiding failure, we accidentally avoid the exact experiences that lead to our success. Imagine what your life would look like if you weren't afraid to fail. How many opportunities would you go after? How many different things would you try? How creative would you be? You might be free to take a lot more chances and make a lot more attempts that would eventually lead to your success.
