365 Days With Self-Discipline: 365 Life-Altering Thoughts on Self-Control, Mental Resilience, and Success

Day 87: On Attributing Failure to External

Factors

When  interpreting  their  own  failures  (...)  individuals  tend  to  make

external  attributions,  pointing  to  factors  that  are  outside  of  their  direct

control  (such  as  luck).  As  a  result,  their  motivation  to  exert  effort  on  the

same task in the future is reduced.

—Bradley R. Staats

 

82

Failure  can  offer  valuable  feedback  that  will  help  you  achieve  your

goal.  Unfortunately,  many  people  lose  the  learning  opportunity  by

attributing the failure to an external factor, such as luck.

Consequently, instead of identifying the root cause in something they

did, they wrongly assume that they had no control over the situation. This

not  only  makes  them  less  likely  to  exert  equal  effort  during  subsequent

attempts  (which  in  itself  reduces  their  chances  of  success),  but  also

increases the risk they’ll repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

As a result, they enter a downward spiral: each failure makes them less

motivated to try again, and soon they give up, frustrated at how unfair the

world is. It wasn’t really the world that was responsible; it was their own

failure to take responsibility for their failure and learn from it.

Make sure that whenever you fail, you always look for the cause of the

failure  in  something  that  you did,  and  not  in  something  that  you  couldn’t

control .

Even when it looks as if something was indeed outside of your control,

it  doesn’t  mean  that  you  didn’t  make  any  mistakes  that  might  have

increased  the  chances  of  such  an  outcome.  Identifying  those  mistakes  —

even if they were only partially responsible for the failure — will help you

in future attempts and prevent you from developing the unhelpful mindset

that you don’t have direct influence over your life.

For example, if you weren’t hired by your dream company, perhaps it

wasn’t your fault. Maybe there was a better candidate, the hiring manager

didn’t  like  you,  or  the  company  later  decided  against  hiring  a  new

employee.

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However,  even  in  such  a  case,  it’s  valuable  to  ponder  whether  there

was anything you could have done better. Perhaps you could have improved

your  resume,  asked  better  questions  during  the  interview,  or  been  better

prepared for the questions you had assumed were unlikely to be asked.

Maybe it still wouldn’t have resulted in success, but at least that way

you  will  have  learned  something  new  that  will  increase  your  chances  of

getting hired the next time, and consequently, you get to lift your spirits and

boost your determination.

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