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Most of us have grown up with the idea that mistakes are bad, especially if we attended test-driven schools, where we were frequently marked down for making mistakes, or our parents punished mistakes with harsh words and actions. This is unfortunate, and this is why.

      LEARNING KEY #2

      The times when we are struggling and making mistakes are the best times for brain growth.

      When we are willing to face obstacles and make mistakes in the learning process, we enhance neural connections that expedite and improve the learning experience. The research on the positive impact of mistakes and struggle is emerging from both neuroscience¹ and behavioral studies of high-achieving people.² Some of this work is counterintuitive, as we have believed for so long in the absolute necessity that everything be “correct.” Releasing people from the idea that they must always be correct and not make any mistakes turns out to be transformative.

      The Science of Mistakes

      I first became aware of the positive impact of mistakes when I was hosting a workshop for teachers and Carol Dweck, the pioneer of mindset research, joined us. The teachers attending the workshop that day had gathered in a large group and listened attentively to Carol. She announced that every time we make mistakes, synapses fire in the brain, indicating brain growth. All the teachers in the room were shocked, as they had all been working under the premise that mistakes are to be avoided. Carol was drawing from work that has researched the brain’s response when we make mistakes, particularly investigating the different ways brains respond when people have a growth or a fixed mindset.³

      Jason Moser and his colleagues extended Carol’s work investigating the brain’s response when we make mistakes. Moser and his team found something stunning. They had asked participants to take tests while they monitored the participants’ brains with MRI technology. They looked at the scans when people got questions correct and when they got them incorrect. The researchers found that when people made mistakes, brains were more active, producing strengthening and growth, than when people got work correct.⁴ Neuroscientists now agree that mistakes positively contribute to the strengthening of neural pathways.

      This learning key is particularly significant because most teachers design classes so that everyone is successful. Curricula and textbooks are designed with trivial, unchallenging questions, so that students will get a high percentage of answers correct. The common belief is that getting most answers correct will motivate students toward greater success. Here’s the problem, though. Getting questions right is not a good brain exercise.

      For students to experience growth, they need to be working on questions that challenge them, questions that are at the edge of their understanding. And they need to be working on them in an environment that encourages mistakes and makes students aware of the benefits of mistakes. This point is critical. Not only should the work be challenging to foster mistakes; the environment must also be encouraging, so that the students do not experience challenge or struggle as a deterrent. Both components need to work together to create an ideal learning experience.

      Author Daniel Coyle studied “talent hotbeds,” places producing a larger proportion than normal of high-achievers, and concludes that achievement comes not from any natural-born ability, but rather from a special kind of work and practice. He has studied examples of those who excel at learning in music, sports, and academic subjects. His research reveals that all of the people who achieved at very high levels engaged in a particular kind of practice that caused the coating of brain pathways with myelin.

      Our brains function through an interconnected web of nerve fibers (including neurons), and myelin is a form of insulation that wraps around fibers and increases their signal strength, speed, and accuracy. When we revisit an idea or kick a soccer ball, myelin coats the neural pathways involved, optimizing the particular circuits and making our movements and thoughts more fluid and efficient in the future. Myelin is vital to the learning process. Most learning takes time, and myelin aids the process by reinforcing signals and slowly strengthening pathways. Coyle gives a number of examples of the highest-achieving mathematicians, golfers, soccer players, and pianists practicing their craft and describes the role of myelin in wrapping layers of insulation around their neural circuits. He characterizes the world’s experts as having “super-duper pathways” wrapped in layer upon layer of myelin, which makes them very effective.

      So how do we all develop “super-duper pathways”? This occurs when people are working at the edge of their understanding, making mistake after mistake in difficult circumstances, correcting mistakes, moving on and making more mistakes—constantly pushing themselves with difficult material.

      Coyle starts his book with an interesting story of learning. He describes the case of a thirteen-year-old girl he calls Clarissa, who is learning the clarinet. Clarissa, he says, has no musical “gifts,” lacks a “good ear,” and has only an average sense of rhythm and subpar motivation—yet she became famous in music circles, because she managed to accelerate her learning by ten times, according to the calculations of music psychologists. This amazing learning feat was captured on video and has been studied by music experts. Coyle describes watching the video of Clarissa practicing and suggests that the video be given a title of “The Girl Who Did a Month’s Worth of Practice in Six Minutes.” He describes the practice session this way:

      Clarissa draws a breath and plays two notes. Then she stops. She pulls the clarinet from her lips and stares at the paper. Her eyes narrow. She plays seven notes, the song’s opening phrase. She misses the last note and immediately stops, fairly jerking the clarinet from her lips. … She starts over and plays the riff from the beginning, making it a few notes farther into the song this time, missing the last note, backtracking, patching in the fix. The opening is beginning to snap together—the notes have verve and feeling. When she’s finished with this phrase, she stops again for six long seconds, seeming to replay it in her mind, fingering the clarinet as she thinks. She leans forward, takes a breath, and starts again.

      It sounds pretty bad. It’s not music; it’s a broken-up, fitful, slow-motion batch of notes riddled with stops and misses. Common sense would lead us to believe that Clarissa is failing. But in this case common sense would be dead wrong.⁵

      A music expert watching the video commented on Clarissa’s practice, saying it was “amazing” and, “If somebody could bottle this, it’d be worth millions.” Coyle points out: “This is not ordinary practice. This is something else: a highly targeted, error-focused process. Something is growing, being built. The song begins to emerge, and with it, a new quality within Clarissa.”⁶

      In each of the learning cases Coyle reviews, he says that the learner has “tapped into a neurological mechanism in which certain patterns of targeted practice build skill. Without realizing it, they have entered a zone of accelerated learning that, while it can’t quite be bottled, can be accessed by those who know how. In short, they’ve cracked the talent code.”⁷

      One of the significant characteristics of the highly effective learning described is the presence of mistakes and the role of struggle and error in transforming people from beginners into experts. This is consistent with the brain research showing increased brain activity when people struggle and make mistakes and decreased activity when they get work correct.⁸ Unfortunately, most learners think they should always be getting work correct, and many feel that if they make mistakes or struggle, they are not good learners—when this is the very best thing they can be doing.

      Practice is important for the development of any knowledge or skill. Anders Ericsson helped the world understand the nature of expert performance and found that most world-class experts—pianists, chess players, novelists, athletes—practiced for around ten thousand hours over twenty years. He also found that their success was not related to tests of intelligence but to the amount of “deliberate practice” they undertook.⁹ Importantly, although people succeed because they are trying hard, the people who become experts are trying hard in the right way. A range of different researchers describe effective practice in the same way—people pushing at the edge of their understanding, making mistakes, correcting them, and making more.

      A Different View of Struggle

      Every

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