Rethinking Education #1 Why You Need to Fail - Derek Sivers

​Boy howdy, can I resonate with this! Learning from failure is one of the key parts of scientific inquiry and one of my goals within my classroom is to expose students to a healthy attitude toward failure. There were many times where I have failed and used the opportunity to reflect upon the experience and improve upon whatever it was I may have failed in. Within the video by Derek Sivers, he outlines 3 reasons for failure:

1. Learning

Here, Sivers provides evidence for learning through failure through multiple studies and anecdotes that show how failure is represented in learning scenarios. Asking the viewer to complete a similar test to one of the studies helped illuminate how exactly learning comes about from the activity. As I’ve taught in outdoor education over the years, I find that many times it isn’t the repetition of material that drives student learning, but the experience of applying it.

1. Growth Mindset

I admire how mindsets were described by Sivers - not as a fundamental differences, but as something malleable and built from environmental factors. Within a fixed mindset, one is believed to have natural abilities or talents that set them apart from others and manifest as affinities for certain types of work or topics. The growth mindset comes from the idea of an effort-driven approach that anyone can become a master of anything. I would put myself in the growth mindset camp, believing firmly that great effort results in great talent. How this pertains to failure is, again, taking the experiences of failure and using them as a place to grow from, rather than an insurmountable obstacle as a fixed mindset might believe. Sivers suggestion of praising effort rather than natural ability is something I aim to do within my classroom and, indeed, I have seen improvements in students that I have complemented this way. Towards the end of this segment, I have to concur with Sivers that if we all saw each other’s “sweaty working progress” we would be much more receptive to each other’s varying abilities or aspects.

1. Experiments

Can’t say enough how much this hits home for me, as a science educator. Experiments are vital to confirming or disproving hypotheses and within a science class it is important to have students attempt multiple ways of developing experiments to learn how to design a proper experiment. I think Sivers example of his singing instructor using the various aspects of a piece of music to show how there is not one way of singing, it is merely one option that Sivers has chosen to follow. I think Sivers gets a little misleading when he says that each shouldn’t be considered a failure, as they are just experiments, but experiments can and should fail if they do not meet the criteria or don’t hold water under examination.


Sivers, D. (2011). Retrieved November 04, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhxcFGuKOys&t=2s