The Neuroscience of Success: Train Your Brain to Seek Failure
In this solo talk, neuroscientist and coach Emily McDonald (Emma on the Brain) explains why increasing your failure rate actually boosts success. She grounds her argument in neuroscience, describing prediction error, negative reinforcement, and the exploration‑exploitation trade‑off as mechanisms that make the brain learn from mistakes. Personal anecdotes—such as a Silicon Valley founder’s advice and deliberately posting a flop video— illustrate how avoiding failure reinforces avoidance behavior. Emily then offers four concrete, neuroscience‑based strategies to rewire the brain: (1) stop tying failure to identity, (2) stop hiding failures and share them openly, (3) reward the act of failing rather than only rewarding wins, and (4) set a "failure quota" to force more attempts, which also cultivates detachment. Throughout, she emphasizes that failure is a learning signal, not a personal flaw, and that by deliberately seeking failure we can unlock creativity, confidence, and ultimately success.
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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. And if you're new here, hi, I'm Emily, also known as Emma on the Brain. I'm a trained neuroscientist. I've got 2 degrees in neuroscience as well as many years of research experience in the lab. I am now a coach to people in over 55 countries all over the world, and I'm here to help you rewire your brain, level up, and live your best life. So let's dive straight into the neuroscience here. Why do we need to fail? Well, the brain actually learns through something called prediction When we get something wrong, the brain goes, oh, I was wrong. I need to update my model. And the only way we get things wrong, the only way we know if we're wrong, is if we actually make the attempt. And I actually used to apply this intuitively back when I was in school and I would be studying for an exam. I would actually test myself on the information before I had even really studied. And I would do it periodically throughout the studying process. I would do it like in the beginning, and then maybe after a day or two, I would frequently test myself on the the information, not because I thought I knew it all. I knew I didn't, but it was the best way to know exactly what I didn't know and also to kind of trigger my brain, right? Because getting it wrong triggers your brain to update the model. This is prediction error. Your brain's prediction was wrong. Your brain goes, oop, we made an error, let's update the prediction. And your brain learns really, really well through that process. Failing through experience is one of our greatest teachers. I remember when I was actually first getting ready to graduate from grad school, I was on the phone with a tech founder in Silicon Valley, and I was just kind of asking him questions, talking to him, getting advice for starting my own business and going into the entrepreneurial world. And something that he asked me was, have you ever tried to start a business and failed? And I was like, well, no, I haven't done that yet. And he said, okay, well, investors, they're actually going to look for that. When you go to investors and ask them for their money, they actually want to see that you've tried and failed before because that means that you know something. And that was the first experience that really kind of smacked me in the face and kind of shifted my perspective on failure, because in that situation it was actually a good thing. Oh, failure equals experience, and experience is something that investors look for before they want to give you their money. But that's not all, because avoiding failure actually makes you less likely to succeed. I'm sure you've heard of positive reinforcement before, right? If you are training your dog to sit you give your dog a treat. You give the dog a reward that positively reinforces the sitting behavior, right? That's what positive reinforcement is. But there is also something called negative reinforcement in psychology. And negative reinforcement essentially is reinforcing the behavior by removing something bad, removing a negative experience. Okay? So if you are wanting to achieve a goal, You have a dream, right? But you are afraid. You are afraid. You're afraid of rejection. You're afraid of failure, whatever it is. Every time you avoid taking action out of fear of rejection, out of fear of failure, you are removing the stress and the fear, right? Because if you took that action, it would be stressful. So I'm just going to not take that action. I'm just going to sit back because I'm afraid, because I'm unsure, because I don't feel ready, because I don't know if I'm going to be rejected. And every time you do that, You reinforce your brain through negative reinforcement. You remove the anxious feeling through avoidant behavior, right? Through avoiding the behavior that's gonna get you closer to your dreams, you remove the stress, anxiety, or fear, and you reinforce that avoidance to your brain. So now your brain is learning and being rewarded by avoidant behavior. And what do you think your brain is going to continue to do in the face of opportunity? In the face of, I could do this, I could make this attempt, I could try. What do you think your brain is gonna do? Well, it's going to do what it's been trained to do. It's going to do the thing that it's been reinforced to do. Avoid. Avoid making the attempts to keep you safe because you have essentially rewarded yourself for not trying. And this is the loop that a lot of people get stuck in. Their brains have been rewarded for not trying. They've been rewarded for avoidant behavior for so long that it just feels normal. But you are not the problem. You are not the problem. are not the problem, and you can train your brain to stop doing this. And this is the best part of the brain, okay? We have this beautiful ability to activate neuroplasticity, to rewire our brain, and to change the behaviors that we reward so that we can actually make attempts and do the work toward achieving our goals and dreams, even in the face of fear. If you are avoiding failure and therefore you don't try, You're not actually avoiding failure because you're not even playing the game. The only way to truly fail in this life is to not try. If you're not playing the game, you're not even taking the shots. You're not even showing up. Taking the shots and missing is still showing up, and that's not failing because you are learning. And that is how the brain updates its predictions. Remember, this is how you gain experience. So avoiding failure It keeps you from learning. It keeps you from gaining the experience, and it also blocks you from even making the attempt because it's training your brain to avoid even trying. It also blocks creativity because we sort of have these 2 modes in our brains. In psychology, they call it exploitation versus exploration. And creativity, which is what leads to success in a lot of fields, okay, we need to be creative. We need to be able to be coming up with ideas. This requires experimentation, exploration. That's what play is too, right? Play allows us to explore and experiment. This is how we come up with a lot of beautiful ideas, right? And if you are afraid to fail, you are going to shift into exploitation. You're just gonna rest back on what's always worked, what's worked in the past. This is where people end up on paths they don't even wanna be on, paths that have been laid out before them that have, that have worked for other people. And now you're doing these things, you're taking these actions, you're following these frameworks, you're doing these things that have worked for other people, but That doesn't necessarily mean that it works the best for you. And that also doesn't mean that there isn't something better that is there for you to unlock. I myself have fallen into this trap before when I kind of shift into a little bit of— when the fear of failure starts creeping in, I start to rest back on what's worked for me in the past. And what I've noticed is, one, it takes the joy out of the process because I'm not exploring, I'm not experimenting, I'm not playing, which removes the joy. from the process. It removes that play, the whimsical spirit from my work, from what I do. And it also just turns into this like rigid thing and it starts to feel stale. And when your work starts to become stale, I mean, you already can guess what's going to happen next. So exploration, experimentation, all of that is required for creativity and for success, especially in creative jobs. And so fearing failure can definitely creep up and hold you back in that arena as well. But now I want to make a shift. I want to talk about how you can Train your brain to seek failure, to love failure. And again, these are not just behavioral mindset hacks. These are actually ways to retrain your brain to assign a new meaning to failure altogether. Completely shifts the game for you. Completely shifted the game for me. Let's dive straight into it. Number 1 is to stop making failure about you. Stop making it about your identity. Stop using failure as information about who you are and start using failure as information, as data that you are collecting. You are running an experiment, and if something fails, okay, that failed. I wonder what step in the process led to failure. I wonder if it was because I skipped the creative process. It's not about you. This can be applied to so many different areas of life. This is not just about failure. It is about negatives, feelings, negative experiences in general. But when something happens, when you're, when you get rejected, when you come up short, when you don't, the thing that you want didn't go your way, are you sitting back and making it about you? Are you like, oh God, I'm a failure. Like, I can't believe I did that. I'm never gonna be able to succeed. Gosh, I'm not good enough. Or is your reaction, oh, that attempt failed. What can I learn from it? What can I take from that attempt? What data can I collect? This is actually in research. They've shown a difference between optimists and pessimists. And what optimists do when things go wrong is they keep the information they've collected in that thing that went wrong about the one situation. Pessimists will have something go wrong and make it about the entire world. They'll blow it up and be like, you see, this is why the world sucks. This is why blah, blah, blah, XYZ, right? But what optimists do when something goes wrong, they will observe, okay, yeah, this one thing went wrong and they don't take that and apply it to everything in the world, okay? And you need to do that too when it comes to your failures, when it comes to your rejections, right? Let's say you get rejected by someone. Are you immediately thinking to yourself, gosh, like, I'm not good enough, like, maybe I'm not attractive enough, XYZ? Or are you making it about the situation? Maybe this person is having a bad day. Maybe the way that I approached this person, I can adjust, right? Maybe the conversation I sparked up Could have been better, right? You can make it about gaining skills. You can make it about certain skills. And as long as you adopt a growth mindset about it, because you can grow, you can improve, you can get better. But stop making your failures about your capabilities and about who you are. So drop I'm a failure, drop I'm not good enough, and at least add a yet. You're allowed to not be good at something right now, okay? You're not good enough at it yet. But with practice, with experience, and with failing a bunch of times, you can get good enough. You think I was good enough when I first started creating content? Absolutely not. Me as a creator, especially in short-form content, because long-form is something that I, I'm newer at, but with short-form content, me as a creator, I am creating completely differently than I was 2 years ago, 3 years ago, right? The version of me who had 100,000 followers is completely different as a creator than the version of me who has 2, 3 million. You have a choice. Between two different identities right now in this moment, identity number one is I am successful and therefore I can't fail. Identity number two is I am successful because I am willing to fail. Which identity do you think is stronger and more resilient? It's definitely identity number two. Okay, so adopt identity number two. Sometimes the identity shift itself is enough. Number two is to stop hiding your failures. When you hide your failures, you train your brain to believe that failing is. Some shameful thing. In my community, in MindCraft, my coaching program and community, we literally share our failures. Last call, I had everyone getting into the chat and being like, what did you fail at this past week? And I shared mine openly as well. When we share our failures, shame can't exist. When you're sharing your failures with people that are all loving and understanding and supportive and get— but also what it helps you realize Is that everybody's failing all the time. Everyone is trying, everyone is failing. And if you're not failing, it's because you're not even trying. And that's not something to be proud of. I think it's actually really cool to fail. I think it's really cool to try and care because that means you're getting outside of your comfort zone and you're growing. This is also why it is really important to be careful of where you are shaming other people for failures. I have seen it before, especially online, you know, nowadays, you know, people just judging others for failing or, you know, judging or shaming or talking poorly about someone because they failed and because they failed publicly, right? I would be very careful of judging or talking about other people's mistakes or failures because what you're doing is you are training yourself to avoid those exact things. Because now in your brain, you're going to think other people are going to shame and judge you because that's what you're doing to other people. Sometimes I will literally fail on purpose just to show my brain that it is safe. Back when I hit a million followers on Instagram, there was a short period where I started to take it more seriously and started to fear failure a little bit more just because there were more eyes on me. There was a larger amount of visibility, right? And with that, just, it just felt a little more pressure than I was used to. Okay. And when I recognized that I was starting to fear failure a little bit and that that was blocking me creatively, that was blocking my performance, what did I do? I literally posted a video to flop on purpose. I literally posted a video, not that, not that I thought was bad, but I just knew it wasn't like a viral type of video. It wasn't, it was like on purpose. Like I just posted a video that I wasn't gonna try to make it great at all, just to show my brain that it is okay to fail. It is okay to flop, right? And this did a really powerful thing for me because it allowed me to feel safe. It allowed me to look my fears directly in the face. And one thing that I have learned is that when you run straight at your fears, they tend to get out of the way. Number 3 is to reward failing. I recently realized in my life that I've been doing it backwards. I celebrate and reward my wins. I reward myself when I achieve something. But, but reality is already rewarding when things are going well. Like inherently it is rewarding when you achieve something. When you succeed at something, when you win, that's already rewarding. You want to go and celebrate that even more? Sure, you can. Absolutely. As you should. But we should also be rewarding our failures. And I found that it's actually helpful to keep going when we win. Like when we have an achievement, when we succeed, like, yeah, okay, cool. Like you want to go and celebrate it. Like, I'm the last one to stop you. But a great way to use the energy of a win is to keep going, to use that momentum, use that energy, and Produce more, create more, show up more. We really need the reward, the celebration, the pat on the back, the hug, the matcha, the dinner, the friend time when we feel like we've shown up and we've given it our all and it still wasn't good enough. Those are the moments when we need that little reward, when we need that matcha or those shoes that you've been wanting, right? Those are the moments when we should be rewarding ourselves. Especially if you want to train your brain to stop fearing failure. You want to train your brain to actually seek failure. Well, it's the same way as if you want to train your dog to sit. When you, when you tell it to sit, you have to give it a treat. So give yourself a little treat when you fail. This is how you actually start to reward the attempts, and your brain will motivate you to start taking them more often. So if you took a swing and you got rejected, Reward yourself. You applied to all these different jobs and you haven't heard back. Reward yourself. You tried something terrifying and it didn't work out. Reward yourself. Because those are the exact behaviors that we should be rewarding, because those are the behaviors that you want your brain to motivate you to repeat. The behavior that we're trying to reward and reinforce isn't necessarily to win, because the outcome isn't always in our hands, but making the attempt is in our hands. Making the effort, putting in our all, trying our best— that is in your hands. So that's the thing that you should be reinforcing. So stop only rewarding the positive outcomes that you experience and start rewarding your failures. What's going to happen is your brain is going to start to learn, oh, failing isn't so bad. We actually get a little something something from this. And after I had this breakthrough myself and started applying this in my own life, I I actually had a moment. I was doing something outside of my comfort zone, and it didn't exactly go the way that I wanted it to. And at first, I was beating myself up. I was like, gosh, why do I keep making this same mistake? Why do I keep doing this? You know, like, I'm trying to win in this new arena, and it's just not perfect yet. And it was someone on my team that literally reminded me, Em, weren't you just talking about this new thing that you're going to do where you're going to be rewarding your failures? And Yes, I was applying this in a different area of my life and it was showing up for the first time in a, in an area that I wasn't planning for it to, because I wasn't planning on failing in this other arena. But when it came up, I was like, you know what? No, you're right. I need to reward myself because I'm taking the steps. I'm making the efforts. I'm taking the swings. And those are the exact behaviors that we want to be rewarding. Because the truth of the matter is, if you're trying to win at something new, if you're trying to get good at something new, there are gonna be failures in the process. There are gonna be times when you have failures or when you get rejected or you have setbacks or you just like don't have extreme clarity yet. You just haven't figured it out totally yet. Like, that is actually normal. That is a part of the process. That is a part of the winning journey. Failing is a part of the winning journey. So you might as well start rewarding the attempts, start rewarding yourself for having the courage in the first place to try. And number 4 brings all of this together, wraps it all up in a beautiful little box, and it is to create a failure quota. Make failing the goal. When I did this, it unlocked an energy in me. When I made failure the goal, all of a sudden the creative energy was flowing. The attempts were being made. The swings were just knocking things out of the park. You make failing the goal. You tell yourself, you tell yourself you want that thing. You want whatever outfit, what, whatever reward that you usually give to yourself, whether it's hanging out with your friends or whatever it is, you want to do that. So you got to fail 10 times first. What that means is you will have to make 10 attempts, and when you make 10 attempts, odds are not all of those will be failures. So you train your brain, you reward yourself for failing, and you train your brain. You go after those 10 failures, and you might accidentally end up Succeeding. The only way to increase the number of times that you fail is to increase the number of times that you try. So what you're really doing is making it sort of like an attempt quota, but I love making it a failure quota. I love making it a goal to fail, specifically to fail, because it also allows you to practice detachment. It's like a super master key unlock for detachment, because when I started making the attempts and I'm like, it's okay. Rather than getting anxious or stressed or worrying about the outcome or being attached to the outcome and, and trying to, to succeed, trying to make it win, right? Immediately, whenever that old creepy feeling would come up, my instant reaction was, oh wait, no, like the goal of this was to fail, so it's fine. When the goal is to fail, there's literally no way to fail. It's a beautiful unlock. It really is. And again, when you make the goal to fail 20 times, you're gonna have to try it 20 times. And Watch, you're not gonna fail 20 times, and then you're gonna have to try probably 40 times because you are going to be succeeding a lot more too. In the end, the goal is obviously not to become someone who fails all the time. The goal is to become someone who is willing to. So reward the attempt, celebrate the flop, collect your rejections and make that failure quota. Train your brain to seek failure. And you might accidentally end up training it to succeed instead. And if you want to dive into the neuroscience of manifestation, you want to learn more about the neuroscience of your subconscious mind, what's blocking you, and exactly how to train the different components of your nervous system so that you can upgrade your subconscious and upgrade your reality, then check out the link in the description below this episode because there's a link to sign up and RSVP for my free live masterclass where I break all of this down and answer all of your questions at the end. So check out the link in the description. I'm sending you so much love. I believe in you. I'm rooting for you. And go out there and fail a bunch of times, please, for me. I'll see you in the next one. Bye. Bye.
