The Science Of: Why Some People Grow From Failure And Others Don't

Added: 2026-06-06

[00:00:00]Smart people fail more because the fastest learners are making useful mistakes. If you've been stuck for months, the problem isn't your intelligence or your talent. It's that you're trying to learn in a way your nervous system literally cannot process.

[00:00:15]Your brain physically requires a type of error to learn. If you're trying to be perfect right away, there's a good chance you're stuck in what I call the perfection trap. But if you learn to get the ratio of successes and failures just right, you can dramatically accelerate how fast you learn practically any skill. And I learned that lesson the hard way in the middle of an Olympic training facility when I was hired. The manager called me up and said, "Matt, yes, you're still going to come in on Monday, right?" Yeah, I got my class plans.

[00:00:48]Good, good. Well, we fired everyone.

[00:00:51]Whole thing's on you, okay? [laughter] Okay. Good luck. They had no students left. Lots of pressure to make it work.

[00:00:59]But months later, the program exploded.

[00:01:02]I went from walking into a completely empty room to teaching classes of 25 students and private sessions for internationally competitive athletes.

[00:01:11]And I didn't do it with hustle or talent. I did it by applying a single principle that keeps popping up in neuroscience research, like the challenge point framework. I learned how to find the specific success to failure ratio for every single student. When you do this, your neurons treat failures like successes. In 2004, researchers published what became known as the challenge point framework. And what they found was surprisingly simple and almost universally ignored. Your nervous system does not learn from repetition alone.

[00:01:47]Your neurons learn from a specific ratio of successes to failures. Too much success and your brain stops learning.

[00:01:56]And in my opinion, a 100% success ratio just means you already know the thing.

[00:02:02]As a teacher, I have done nothing for you. But on the flip side, as I've seen across different fields, too much failure and your nervous system genuinely gets lost. It really has no idea what the heck is going on, and it doesn't matter how many times you just send the skill because your neurons struggle too much. They cannot interpret an error percentage of 50 or 70 or 90% and do anything with it. There's just too many things going wrong. And more importantly, as I've experienced with many students, the higher up you go in error percentage, the bigger existing errors get in their magnitude. They become too big for your brain to parse through, and this is where people just get stuck. What's fascinating is how decades of research, schema theory in the 1970s by Richard Schmidt, error-based learning in the late '90s and 2000s to 2011's, the benefits of noise in neural systems all orbit around the same conclusion. Your brain needs a specific challenge zone and some level of error to build new neural architecture. People need mistakes, and they learn fastest when the challenge is high enough to create mistakes, but not so high that performance completely falls apart. Some studies concluded that the ratio of successes to errors is around 70% success to 30% failure, while others went as high as the exact optimal point being 85% success and 15% bad.

[00:03:43]After using this for over a decade working with hundreds of people, I found that it is much more of a zone. It's okay, sometimes it's actually much better and more fun depending on the person to have a higher success rate, meaning that you decrease the size of the step you're taking into the unknown and you go for a 70% success rate where you're able to just make the thing happen. It's not perfect because it's new rather than doing guys I see that go as hard as they can [music] throttling the line of 50/50 where errors get huge. And this is how you try to learn a new language or code or when I was shadowing physical therapist, I would leave the hospital feeling completely mentally exhausted because I overwhelmed myself. And when you do that, neurons can't build stuff.

[00:04:33]But far more interesting and weird for people to understand is that errors or failures can transform from being a poison to being just as useful if not more useful than success. And when you get this, you can also make your brain more dense and much more capable, which is what I built an entire free series around that steps you through the biggest universal driver lying underneath all of this that is down below. First thing to get out of the way is everyone hates mistakes. Coaches hate them and yell at students. Students are taught to feel shame when they make them. They feel bad. They look bad. And in most schools and workplaces, mistakes, errors are treated as evidence that you messed up. But your nervous system doesn't see it that way. Every single attempt you make, whether it succeeds or fails, your brain is running an experiment. It's not trying to be perfect. It's trying to figure out which pattern gets you closest to the target.

[00:05:37]And this is where good errors come in.

[00:05:40]When a mistake [music] happens inside this higher success to lower errors zone, your nervous system processes the mistake as a directional signal, not just oh, that didn't work, but specifically that pattern moved me in this direction. Your neurons don't experience mistakes [music] as failure.

[00:06:02]They experience it as highly useful data and it uses it to build the skill. Now, contrast that with a bad error, one too far outside the zone. Too many things are going wrong and really there is a too big of a gap between what you attempted and what your nervous system can understand. Your brain gets nothing useful back from your effort. It can't use massive errors to know what direction to head in. This blew my mind a little. Research up until very recent has demonstrated that neurons actually need a bit of noise to contrast the signal against to understand what is truly meaningful. Noise is not like good errors that act as signals. Noise is the opposite of signal being useless data.

[00:06:52]However, multiple studies have shown that a small level of noise acts as a background contrast that makes the signal stand out. And the point that your neurons get a useful level of background noise is the same point that they also get good errors. For people who experience lots of good errors with noise helping neurons know what the signals are, they end up building a library of detailed models, maps that your neurons can look at whenever you want to do a skill or any similar skill you don't yet have. And your neurons use the detailed map to learn the similar skill much faster. This is why experienced learners pick up new skills dramatically faster than beginners. They don't just have more talent, they have a massive library of high-quality maps built from signals and good errors that also act as good signals. So, when they encounter a new problem, they never start from scratch. Their neurons end up searching their library of models for any that apply. So often, they don't have to think about what to do as much.

[00:08:06]What I said to one student I had named Charlie, who was ready to give up by the time he walked in the door was, "Yes, we can skip ahead and just try to get lucky, but when you experience both good errors and good signal, you not only get good at doing the thing, you get really good at not doing it wrong, which I say from experience is much more important.

[00:08:29][music] So, what does all of this mean for you?

[00:08:32]It means that how good you can get, how skilled you can get, is not up to instinct or genius or some biological advantage that you have to be born with.

[00:08:42]It's that we need your nervous system to experience the acceleration that comes when every piece of information it collects is actually useful. Every training session you do is structured inside your personal zone, where the worst mistake you can make is trying to skip ahead, where you lose the information your nervous system actually needs. We need to reframe failure. Every mistake generates a directional [music] signal. Every error sculpts and builds the physical model your neurons are trying to figure out just as much as your successes, if not more. Having good signals, errors, and a touch of noise is how you end up stacking multiple effects on top of each other that allow your neurons to quickly assemble any skill or set of knowledge you could want. That may very well be talent. It's just that most people were never taught how mistakes are actually necessary. So, most people stop YOLO skills and expect perfection right away. Understanding how failure works allows you to avoid what I call repetition madness and learning becomes thrilling. But, if none of this was very interesting, then I saved my best fact for last. There is one biological upgrade your nervous system only unlocks when you've been training consistently inside the zone. Scientists call it myelination, a process where your brain wraps the neural pathways for a skill in a fatty sheath that makes signal transmission up to 100 times faster. It is the difference between a skill you have to think about and a skill that you can just do. But, the problem is right as this starts working, almost everyone runs into a common barrier that seems to never fail to show up and suddenly everything just stops working, sometimes for months. And that problem is exactly what I cover in this video right here. It's all just some science. See you in the next one.