Failing Forward: The Biology of Growth Through Setbacks

Three times a week, usually before the campus fully wakes up, I go to the gym to pick up heavy things and put them back down. I’m not training for a competition, and I’m certainly not an athlete. I’m just trying to keep gravity at bay for a few more years.

Every now and again, I start to struggle with a weight I’ve lifted a hundred times before. My arms shake. My form wobbles. Eventually, the bar simply stops moving halfway up, and I have to bail out, letting the weights clank loudly against the safety pins. It looks, by all standard definitions, like a failure.

And in the gym, that’s exactly what we call it: "training to failure."

It’s a strange term when you think about it. In almost every other part of my life—in the lecture hall, in committee meetings, in my relationships—failure is the thing I run from. It’s the nightmare scenario. We dress it up with softer words like "setback" or "challenge," but we treat it like a contagion. We worry that if we fail at a task, we are a failure.

Yet, under the iron, the logic flips. I know that the moment my muscles give out is not the end of the workout; it’s the entire point of it. That moment when I physically cannot complete the rep is the signal to my body that the current standard isn't good enough. It’s the only reliable data I have that tells me I’ve reached my limit, and consequently, it’s the only trigger for growth.

Sometimes I hit a plateau. I’ll be stuck at the same weight for weeks, maybe even months. It’s frustrating, boring, and ego-bruising. But I’ve learned to strangely look forward to that wall. I know that the stagnation isn’t a sign to stop; it’s just evidence that the breakthrough is piling up on the other side, waiting for one last "failed" attempt to finally push through.

So why is it that when I leave the gym and walk into my office, I leave that logic at the door? Why do we treat failure in our careers or relationships as a verdict, when we should be treating it like a heavy set of squats—painful, messy, but absolutely necessary if we want to get stronger?

The "Rough Draft" of Evolution

This need for failure isn't just a quirk of weightlifting; it is the fundamental engine of biology. If you look closely at the natural world, you realize that Mother Nature is actually a messy writer. She doesn't outline; she doesn't plan. She just throws things against the wall to see what sticks.

Consider evolution. We often think of it as this sleek, upward march toward perfection—survival of the fittest and all that. But mechanically, evolution is built entirely on mistakes. It relies on mutation. And what is a mutation? It’s a typo. It’s a copying error in the genetic code.

When a cell divides, it tries to copy its DNA perfectly. Most of the time it succeeds. But sometimes, it slips up. It writes an A where there should have been a T. Most of these typos are useless. Some are disastrous. But every once in a while, one of those random screw-ups turns out to be a brilliant innovation. It gives a moth a slightly better camouflage pattern or makes a bacteria resistant to heat.

If nature had a spell-checker that worked perfectly 100% of the time, we wouldn't be here. Life would have stalled out at the single-cell stage. The only reason complexity exists is because the system allowed for error.

We, however, treat our own lives with a rigid intolerance for these "mutations." I see it in my students constantly. They sit frozen before a blank page, terrified to write a single sentence because they are afraid it won't be the right sentence. They want their first essay to be their final draft. They want their first career move to be the permanent one. They are terrified of the rough draft.

But if we view our lives through the lens of biology, a failed project isn't a sign of incompetence. It’s a variation. You tried something new—a new way of teaching a class, a new hobby, a different way of communicating with a partner—and maybe it crashed and burned.

Okay. That was a non-adaptive mutation.

But you need that volume of errors. You need the pile of discarded attempts. When we try to edit out all the risk and all the potential for failure from our lives, we are effectively stopping our own evolution. We are demanding a level of perfection that biology itself doesn't even bother with. We stagnate because we are too afraid to make the typo that might just save us.

The Science of "No"

If biology relies on clumsy mistakes, science relies on proving itself wrong.

There’s a concept in the philosophy of science called "falsification," championed by Karl Popper. The basic idea is that you can never really prove a theory is one hundred percent true. No matter how many white swans you count, you can never say with absolute certainty that "all swans are white." There might be a black one hiding around the next bend.

However, you can prove things are false. The moment you spot that one black swan, you know for a fact that the theory "all swans are white" is wrong.

This sounds depressing—like we can only know what isn't true, not what is. But in the lab, this is incredibly useful. When a scientist runs an experiment and it fails to produce the expected result, they haven't wasted their time. They have generated "negative data." They have successfully identified a path that leads nowhere. They can cross it off the map and stop walking down it.

In our actual lives, though, we are terrible at valuing negative data. When we apply for a grant and don't get it, or when we date someone for three months only to realize we have nothing in common, we treat it as lost time. We think, "I just wasted three months of my life."

But have you?

If you treat your life like a scientific inquiry, that bad data wasn't a waste; it was a successful experiment in falsification. You had a hypothesis ("This person might be a good partner"), you tested it, and the data came back negative. That is a concrete result. You now know something about what you don't want, which narrows the field of what you do want.

The problem is that we usually bury this data. We are so ashamed of the "failure" that we try to forget it happened. We shove the rejection letter in a drawer; we delete the photos; we pretend the awkward attempt at learning French never occurred. By doing that, we throw away the data.

If we were smart, we’d log it. We’d look at that rejection and ask, "Okay, the hypothesis was that this grant proposal was ready. The data says no. Why? Was the scope too broad? Was the methodology shaky?"

When you start collecting your "no"s as diligently as your "yes"s, the sting of failure dulls. It stops being a judgment on your worth and starts being just another point on the graph, steering you—sometimes painfully, but accurately—toward the thing that actually works.

The Happy Accident

Beyond the hard data of "no," failure sometimes offers a gift we don't deserve: luck.

We tend to think of our lives as itineraries. We map out the route from Point A (Graduate) to Point B (Get Job) to Point C (Retire). When we take a wrong turn or get a flat tire, we panic. We view the deviation as a pure loss of time. But history is littered with people who found their greatest success only because they made a mess of their original plan.

Take Alexander Fleming. In 1928, Fleming was studying staphylococcus bacteria. By all accounts, he wasn't the tidiest researcher. He went on vacation and left a stack of petri dishes sitting out on a bench instead of putting them in the incubator. When he came back, the dishes were contaminated. A common mold had drifted in through an open window and landed on his work.

A "good" scientist—one who followed protocol perfectly—would have looked at that ruined experiment with disgust, sterilized the plates, and started over. The experiment was a failure. The data was corrupted.

But Fleming didn't clean it up. He looked closer. He noticed that around the spots of mold, the bacteria were dead. That "ruined" petri dish contained the discovery of penicillin, which has since saved hundreds of millions of lives.

This is the serendipity of the stumble. When we are hyper-focused on executing our plans perfectly, we develop tunnel vision. We stare so hard at the goal that we miss the landscape. Failure breaks that gaze. It forces you to look at the wreckage. And sometimes, in the wreckage, you find something far better than what you were trying to build in the first place.

I’ve seen this in my own career. I’ve had research papers rejected by journals, which forced me to rewrite them from a new angle, which led me to a body of literature I hadn't read, which eventually opened up an entirely new field of study for me. If the original paper had been accepted—if I had "succeeded"—I would have stayed on the narrower, safer path. The rejection kicked me off the road and into the weeds, where I found the interesting stuff.

This requires a certain amount of faith in chaos. It asks us to trust that a deviation isn't always a disaster. When things go wrong, when the plan falls apart, our instinct is to sweep the broken pieces away as fast as possible to hide the shame.

My advice? Pause. Look at the debris before you sweep it up. Don't clean up the mess too quickly; there might be gold in the mold.

The Fabric of Life

Of course, I’m conscious that I’m making this sound a bit too tidy. I’m an academic, and we love to organize messy reality into neat theories. But the truth is, not every failure is a stepping stone. Sometimes, you don't discover penicillin; you just get moldy bread. Sometimes the experiment fails and you just lose funding. Sometimes you lift the heavy weight and you simply tear a pectoral muscle. There are failures that are just... failures. They hurt, they cost us time and money, and they don't offer any profound wisdom in return.

We have to make space for that, too. If we try to force a silver lining onto every single disaster, we start lying to ourselves. We become those annoying people who tell a grieving friend that "everything happens for a reason." Sometimes things happen for no reason at all, other than the fact that entropy is real and the universe is indifferent to our plans.

But even those hollow failures are part of the deal. You cannot selectively subscribe to the parts of reality you like. You can't ask for the strength without the strain.

So, as we stare down the barrel of a new year, I am not going to wish you a year of perfect success. That would be boring, and frankly, it would mean you aren't trying hard enough. I hope you try things that are too heavy for you. I hope you write bad sentences and conduct dead-end experiments. I hope you trip, and in the stumbling, you find a path you didn't know was there.

I hope you fail. Because it means you’re actually doing something.