Embracing Failure as a Practice with ADHD
This week we're diving into the Paradox of Failure. It's something game designer Jesper Juul came up with, and it's all about how gamers are weirdly drawn to the very thing we're trying to avoid: failure. Even when a game is exasperating, we just keep going back for more. It's all part of this cycle Juul talks about, where we set a goal, totally flub it, and then scramble to find a solution. It's a crazy ride, but it helps us grow and keeps us from throwing in the towel.
Dr. Carol Dweck taught us about the "growth mindset." It's all about loving a good challenge and not letting failure get you down. Instead, we use it as a springboard to get better and smarter. We'll also share some tips and tricks to help you embrace this kind of mindset, so you can tackle failures head-on, whether you're battling a boss in a game or facing challenges in the real world.
Links & Notes
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Pete Wright:
Hello everybody and welcome to Taking Control, the ADHD podcast on True Story FM. I'm Pete Wright, and right there is Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hello everyone. Hello, Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
Oh, hi.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, hi.
Pete Wright:
We're wrapping up our games, little mini-game series right now.
Nikki Kinzer:
This was fun.
Pete Wright:
It was so fun, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
I really enjoyed it.
Pete Wright:
I think we did a whole five... This is a fifth episode in our little mini-game series, not a little mini-game series. This was super fun.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's a big series.
Pete Wright:
It's a big series, and we are doing it today talking about what we have learned about failure and what games can teach us about failure in living our lives with ADHD. And I'm pretty excited about it. I've been doing some reading and it's good stuff. We should learn from failure. That's the lesson. I'll save you a listen, learn from failure. Moving on.
Nikki Kinzer:
We're done now.
Pete Wright:
If you don't want to move on, you can hang with us for the rest of the show, but first, head over to takecontroladhd.com, get to know us a little bit better, listen to the show right there on the website or subscribe to our mailing list, and we will send you an email each time a new episode is released. Connect with us on Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest at Take Control ADHD. But to really get to know us, get to annoying us...
Nikki Kinzer:
So we can annoy you.
Pete Wright:
So we can annoy you. If you're ready to be annoyed, you should head over to our Discord server. The ADHD Discord server is really, really fun and we're making some changes in it. It's now prettier. The first step is prettier.
Nikki Kinzer:
Emoji.
Pete Wright:
So pretty.
Nikki Kinzer:
Emojis everywhere. I love it.
Pete Wright:
Oh, it's so pretty. Emojis. I've got to just, I've been doing reading on making Discord a better place and I'm just doing it and it's great. I am having a ball.
Nikki Kinzer:
I think it's great too.
Pete Wright:
I think it's super fun and so be on the lookout for more changes to come. But the point is, if you're just finding the show for the first time, head into the public Discord community. Right now, there's one channel, but there's going to be more, wink, and we're excited to bring those to you all and hang out and make it a place that is good and safer for people beyond just the podcast, but people living with ADHD who want to learn more from one another because we have a great community of those people. So takecontroladhd.com/discord will take you over to the login and sign up.
Now, once you get there and you fall in love with the place, which you will, you should head over to patreon.com/theADHDpodcast and learn about our Patreon. It's fantastic. It helps us so, so much to continue to do what we do and invest in what we do for the ADHD community. And you should check it out for just a few bucks a month. It is listener supported community podcasting, the works. And you also get access to all of the super secret channels in Discord. You get access to the member live stream. You can watch along with us as we stumble into the live stream each week. Okay, just today. We're only stumbling today, but you could see all the mistakes and burps and all that stuff that gets cut from the final show. Plus the most important part is you get to stick around after the show for the Q&A that only members get to be a part of, and we love that part. So that's it. patreon.com/theADHDpodcast to learn more. Nikki, we're talking about failure today.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, we are.
Pete Wright:
And-
Nikki Kinzer:
You have a lot of notes in here.
Pete Wright:
Well, so here's the thing. I just find, find it so interesting, the nature of games and our perception of failure as a result of the games we play. And a lot of the stuff that I was reading is about video games because that's kind of the corner that I live in.
Nikki Kinzer:
What we've been talking about.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. But so much of this I think applies to just gaming and a gaming mindset because what has to come with a gaming mindset is not just the spirit of competition, that we are now competing and we're all trying to win, but it's also the perspective that we might lose. We might lose because not everybody always wins. And why do we keep going to these experiences that put us in a perspective of seeking out, in that respect, failure and what we learned from it. So before we start, do you have any just off the dome thoughts about your own orientation around failure and what that does to you psychologically, emotionally, physically?
Nikki Kinzer:
You know, I do. And I think it's changed a little bit over time. And I don't know if that's because as you get older, maybe you do get more mature. I don't know. Maybe you do get more wise, but I'm not as afraid of it. I'm not saying that I'm never afraid of it, but I'm certainly not as afraid of it in a business perspective. And you've known me since... Well, you've worked with me in this company since day one. You knew me before that, but I'm not afraid to try things. I will throw it out there and if it doesn't work, I'm okay with that. I don't take it as a personal character failure or anything like that.
So there's some things that I am definitely worth, I think it's worth just throwing it out, see how it sticks, if people like it or if they don't like it. I think in a personal... I mean you're always, it's where you kind of get stuck, right? It's like what's the outcome going to be? What are people going to think? So I don't know, it's a messy relationship.
Pete Wright:
It is messy.
Nikki Kinzer:
I try to get past it, and sometimes I do and sometimes I don't.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. And I don't think, I still have a lot of anxiety around just overt public failure and that hangs with me in the back of my mind. It's much less so in the terms of what I do most of my time, which is hanging out on a microphone. I am much more comfortable with misspeaking, and as a result, I think I'm actually better at speaking more fluidly and not tripping over my own tongue time and time again. I think I'm editing myself less now than I did 18 years ago, which is nice. It's nice to have a bit of progress, but when I think of it that way, it is the act of becoming comfortable with the potential for failure that actually makes me more comfortable in doing the job in the first place, in not thinking so hard about it.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's interesting. I think this whole series, we've been talking about games, and when we came up with this idea around failure, this Reel popped up in one of my social medias that said, we learn from failure not success. We don't learn from success because we get the success, we feel it. We think that, okay, we do it again that way and it's going to still be a success. Where we learn is when we do fail or it doesn't turn out the way that you want it to turn out.
And it's so interesting because I've been thinking about that. I did a public presentation a week ago and I was happy with the presentation, but there were definitely things that I think I could do better. And so I was really thinking about that and really putting what I... This is I guess the pro to Reels maybe, is that it was ingrained in me to think about what can I learn from this and how can I make it better?
But not sit in, oh, I wish I did it differently. Not sit in that agony of, oh, I wonder what people thought. Maybe it wasn't as good. I think it was okay, but you know what I mean. But to be able to take it and say, okay, no, what am I going to do in the future? So I think we have to somehow let go or put aside our past experiences and thoughts and really think forward-thinking, what do I do now? I have this information, this is what happened, but what do I do with it?
Pete Wright:
Right? How do we use it to grow? How do we use it to become something different? So this is really, I think, the nut of what has been lingering in the back of my mind, which is the paradox of failure. And in the game community, this was largely popularized by Jesper Juul, and it really addresses the conflict between a game player's desire to avoid failure, coupled with their inclination to seek it out. We want to avoid the failure, but also we kind of can't keep hunting it. And that's the piece. Games are the safe environment for players. As Juul talks about it, the safe environment for players to experiment with failure and learn from it. And in doing so, foster a growth mindset that helps you combat learned helplessness and learned helplessness. We know all about learned helplessness, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes. And we really want to avoid that.
Pete Wright:
Right? Adapting to things that we can't do by lack of trying to do them and to succeed over time can lead to the spirit of learned helplessness. So in Juul's writings, many people continue to play games despite experiencing failure reveals that personal inadequacies in skills or abilities, albeit within the confines of the game that there are. It is counterintuitive to usual human behavior where failure is avoided, that we seek out things that we have no natural skill in doing. I don't necessarily seek out or have an affinity to learn how to become a better archer. And yet still, I play games that cause me in VR that cause me to need to have some sort of facility with a bow and arrow, right? I'm not a race car driver. I like imagining myself as a race car driver and I play a lot of VR driving games.
That's not a skill that I need to get better at in day-to-day life. So I seek out doing this thing that I'm bad at, knowing I'm going to fail, why? I'm human. That's why, frankly, that's why we're wired to do that stuff. So the other thing that he found out in his research is we are drawn to games in which we are responsible for failure rather than those that guarantee success. They may even increase the game's difficulty, I should say players increase the game's difficulty if the challenge becomes too monotonous. I just think it's interesting that the same game that produces a sense of inadequacy also promises the ability to repair that inadequacy in many cases, immediately, and this has been a thing I really have been hanging my hat on, I think we've talked about it over the last couple of weeks. The idea that modern video games, you actually, if you die, they put you right in the same place where you just failed to start doing it again and again.
And growing up, that's not how I was conditioned. I was conditioned that it cost money to fail, that I had to keep putting quarters in the machine. And failure was expensive. That conditioning is that failure was very expensive. And so as a result of that conditioning, I didn't want to fail as a high schooler, as a young adult. Failure was terrifying because I was taught that by games. That's kind of amazing.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's so interesting.
Pete Wright:
That's amazing, right? We've totally turned the table on that. And so for me as an adult now, it's hard to learn that it's okay to fail. In many cases, the cost of failure being so low, like failure inflation is dropping. So let's take advantage of it. Rates are low. Go refinance failure today. That is the failure improvement cycle, as Juul calls it. It's this psychological loop in which a player is introduced to a goal, fails at achieving it, and then seeks a solution. The cycle repeats again and again and again, offering the opportunity to understand and overcome that failure. So the process of failing in a game is an existential significance for players. It means that every moment to moment attempt to avoid failure in a game can reflect on a player's sense of self and their ambitions in real life. What?
Nikki Kinzer:
Okay, we have to reread that. So the process of failing in a game has an-
Pete Wright:
Existential significance for players.
Nikki Kinzer:
For players, this means that each moment to moment attempt to avoid failure in a game can reflect on a player's sense of self and their ambitions in real life.
Pete Wright:
So think about when you're playing a game. What does it tell you about yourself when you are confronted with failure, that you either decide to push through feelings of judgment and low self-esteem and actually try again, which games are designed to get you to do, or you decide that that game is clearly not for you. Now, I'm not saying that games are not designed for people. I'm not saying that. There are some games I just don't like to play, but I am saying that if there's a game that I like to play and then I fail at it, and then I stop playing it as a result of that failure, that's a me problem. That's not a game problem.
And that's probably what we're trying to get across the other side of, and that's why I love so much thinking back to last week's conversation with Eddie Martucci. When we're talking about EndeavorRx, his comments about failure, that the game when they write about the game in their marketing material, is hard. The game is hard, and you're going to be exhausted and you're not going to want to play. It's going to feel like work, and you have to keep playing. This is why. It's because we're trying to rewire your thinking about you in relationship to failure. That you are okay if you can just get over this hump. You exercise your gaming like a muscle, right? Exercising your failure, like a muscle.
Nikki Kinzer:
And you keep playing at life.
Pete Wright:
Yes, yes.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right? When you're talking about that, it just reminds me of something happens and you feel like you failed. I'm just thinking of people that feel, like when they get laid off or they get fired or let go for some reason, the failure, it overcomes them. But what you're saying here is you keep playing, you keep playing. it's hard, it's challenging, it's uncomfortable, but you keep playing.
Pete Wright:
Yes. And one of the things I've been thinking about is, and I even sort of in my draft notes, I sort of named this episode Embracing a Practice of Failure. We talk about making mindfulness a practice and all the things we do that we make a practice. I think the practice of failure is pretty important. And specifically for this last point of Juul's, that video games can help develop growth mindsets and counteract learned helplessness. They offer clear goals, a fair chance at success and rewards for achievement. It's set up to give us all the dopamine fun that we could possibly want, as long as we can get over the fact that it's hard to fail. And making a practice of failure actually makes failing easier and more easy to adapt to and be resilient in the face of. So, go ahead.
Nikki Kinzer:
I found this quote, failure doesn't mean game over. It means try again with experience. Isn't that great? Unknown. I don't know who wrote that or who said that, but I love that.
Pete Wright:
I don't know. I like it. I think that there is, when we talk about practice of mindfulness, this is another one from Mark Serrels at Kotaku describing his victory over the game Dark Souls and its most notoriously difficult sections. So here's what Mark writes. The most common reaction, for me at least, is the calm zen-like focus of understanding. You fought this boss many times. You are now aware of his/her/its patterns and you know how to react to each one. You are currently in the zone. You're having the dream run of dream runs, and you feel utterly invincible. That's the feeling we want to experience in life. But we only get there by trying again when it's hard. We only get there by sending out the 50th resume after failing at the 49th. We only get there by getting up in the morning and walking the dog and getting on the rowing machine after trying to lose that last 10 pounds or build that last bit of muscle or increase that last few minutes of endurance, that we're trying to get to the other side of.
And I think that's a real lesson. Now, just a little appendix to all of this is. Ana Lorena Fábrega is the author of The Learning Game, she wrote the book which is designed around thinking about how we educate our kids and gaming and education. And she opens with... We love Mark Rober around here, Mark Rober, he's a former NASA and Apple engineer, and he now has this incredible YouTube channel where he builds stuff and makes squirrels jump through hoops and really teach experimentation. He's an incredible educator, and he calls this the Super Mario Effect, that he did this experiment and it revealed that when mistakes are not penalized, people are more likely to keep trying, leading to higher success rates. That this should be applied to education in Fábrega's terms, but I think to everything, right? Enhanced learning outcomes by focusing on the end goal and not penalizing mistakes. Because as soon as I get a D on a math test, I'm less likely to be interested in becoming a mathematician. It's the anomalous student that turns a D into a career in mathematics. Yes?
Nikki Kinzer:
I just want to say, so I was watching the TED Talk with Carol Dweck, who is the creator of The Growth Mindset-
Pete Wright:
Dweck.
Nikki Kinzer:
Dweck. And she was saying about with grades that instead of a D or an F, it's just a not yet.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. So perfect.
Nikki Kinzer:
Just not yet right now. Not yet. But you're going to get there. That makes it a lot more motivating.
Pete Wright:
Right? And that goes straight back to teaching, through teaching me as an adult through games, which had formerly taught me through penalty, through money and penalty. So games we know provide environment or failure as part of the process, and it's not penalized. What is it about games that keep people generally optimistic in the face of failure, and what do we learn from them? Even people who rage turn over the Monopoly board, right? They'll learn how to play Monopoly and case in point-
Nikki Kinzer:
Well now they really know how to play because you gave them extra tips.
Pete Wright:
They know how to play. Right. That does it. That's a past episode tip for never having to play Monopoly again because you won't be invited. The educational system is still at a place where we penalize failures because it's a battleship that takes a long time to turn. But incorporating these tools of gamification, of dealing with failure can teach kids how failure's okay, how failure's okay to keep going. And I think we as adults with ADHD can learn from that. We can learn about the game of life by just failing at it and embracing that a little bit more. That the end goal is not the failures along the way. It's not the D on the math test. The end goal is integrating mathematics into your life in a way that you are fluent at it at some level. And talking about fluency. You can only get there by screwing up and learning from those mistakes. So I feel like that is really, really powerful. So that's what I throw up in your face right now.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes. It's great.
Pete Wright:
What do you think?
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, I think it's great. And the only thing that I wanted to add from a coaching point of view is just expanding that growth mindset idea, that it means that you thrive on challenge. You don't see failure as a way to describe yourself, but as a spring forward for growth and developing your abilities, your intelligence, your talents, there are all susceptible.
Pete Wright:
Susceptible.
Nikki Kinzer:
I think this is my problem. Susceptible.
Pete Wright:
Susceptible.
Nikki Kinzer:
Susceptible.
Pete Wright:
That was it.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. Okay. See, I failed, but I kept practicing.
Pete Wright:
But you kept practicing.
Nikki Kinzer:
I didn't give up. I did not give up.
Pete Wright:
Nope. Right there.
Nikki Kinzer:
To growth. Yes. And then, okay, now I'm going to say the last name wrong again because I think I did the first time. Carol Dweck.
Pete Wright:
That's it.
Nikki Kinzer:
Awesome.
Pete Wright:
Carol Dweck. Yep.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes. So she says that in the growth mindset, failure can be a painful experience, but it doesn't define you. It's a problem to be faced, dealt with and learned from. And I think that this is really important because I talk to so many people with ADHD as clients and listeners of the podcast, and I think that a lot of times it can feel like it defines them, that that's all that they remember. They don't remember the good, they don't remember the praises. They remember the times that they got wrote up or the times that they got talked to or about. And so I thought that that was a really important piece of it.
So just with that reminder of understanding what a growth mindset is and catching yourself, listening to yourself and figuring out where are you, where do you stand? Are you at a growth mindset or are you at a fixed mindset? Because that awareness immediately is that first step towards change, because now you can start to flip the script a little bit.
Pete Wright:
It's so interesting, and I kind of like to flip the script again. That failures, as Dweck says, failures don't define you, but maybe they should. I mean, if everything we're talking about holds true, then our failures in fact are the best definition of who we are today. How we respond to the lessons that we learn from failure, in fact are the definition of us.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes. If you could take that-
Pete Wright:
I sort of like that.
Nikki Kinzer:
I do too. But that is also a spin of definitely taking those feelings and making it a positive reaction. So we have to just make sure we get to that positive reaction. And I think that right, when you can share your story and tell other people about it and have that define you, absolutely. We just need to make sure that we don't stay in the definition of, I failed and I suck and I'm a bad person.
Pete Wright:
Well, and because I think that last point. Replacing failing with learning really refines that, it says, you know what? I am the result of everything I've learned in my life, and it's just as easy to say everything I've failed at in my life, but everything I've learned creates a new more optimistic me. And maybe that's what helps you get over the deep despair that comes from the immediate feeling of RSD when you fail, when I fail, and that single experience defines me. Really what we're looking for is to help ourselves create a tapestry of who we are at any given time. And that is made up of more of our learnings in the past than our home run successes.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. And that goes back to what that Reel was saying, from that social media, is that you learn more from failing than you do from success. We want to celebrate those successes. Absolutely. But we also want to learn from when we're in the middle of it, when we're in the-
Pete Wright:
Not if you let your failures rule you, that's really the word, right? Failures can define me and not rule me, and that's the RSD challenge. That I'm letting my failure experience or my perception of my own failure rule my identity. And that's what we have to stay away from. I think failure needs a rebranding.
Nikki Kinzer:
I do too.
Pete Wright:
Around ADHD, and I think it should be a word that is, not a safe word, but a word that is safe to use, not a triggering word, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
We have to be able to say that word to learn from it. And that can be hard when your experience is mired in RSD. And I have those 40 year old experiences that are so challenging to get to the other side of. So I think we need to just, every time we say it needs a flower emoji next to it, right? This is how we learn. This is how we learn.
Nikki Kinzer:
I love it. Thank you, Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
That was fun. That was fun.
Nikki Kinzer:
This was great.
Pete Wright:
Thank You.
Nikki Kinzer:
This was a great series.
Pete Wright:
I think so too. I hope we come around to this, especially because I have not one, but two game designers who came back and said, I'm sorry, my schedule's too crazy. Can we do it later in December? And I said, no, we can't. The door is closed, but maybe not forever. So hopefully we'll have an opportunity that's come back around to this another time.
Nikki Kinzer:
Absolutely.
Pete Wright:
Thank you so much, Nikki, and thank you everybody for hanging out with us today. We appreciate your time and your attention. Don't forget if you have something to contribute to the conversation, we're heading over to the show talk channel on our Discord server, and you can join us right there by becoming a supporting member at the deluxe level or better. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer, I'm Pete Wright, and we'll see you right back here next week on Taking Control, the ADHD podcast.
