In 2016 Mark Rober, a former Nasa engineer set up a challenge to prove that everyone is able to code. He recruited 50 thousand of his YouTube followers to try to programs a simple algorithm online. Peculiar in this challenge was that once a participant run the program but failed to complete the task, an error message would appear. Half of them , in the first group, received following message: “You have failed, please try again”. The second half received a slightly different message: “you have failed, you’ve lost 5 points, you have now 195 points, please try again. “
This difference in the message upon failure made a drastic impact on the performance. While the first group reached an average of 12 attempts and success rate of 68%, the second group only made 5 attempts in average, with a success rate of 52%
The meaningless punishment in form of a fictive point has caused a difference in the framing of failure, and had a direct impact on the number of attempts and thus on the succcess rate.
Imagine if we could just frame the learning process so that we are not over concerned about failures… how much more could we learn, how much more could we achieve?
Mark Rober
For weekly content follow Inspired for Excellence on LinkedIn
or visit
