Robert Sternberg, the present-day guru of intelligence, writes that the major factor in whether people achieve expertise “is not some fixed prior ability, but purposeful engagement.” Or, as his forerunner Binet recognized, it’s not always the people who start out the smartest who end up the smartest.

It’s also important to realize that even if people have a fixed mindset, they’re not always in that mindset. In fact, in many of our studies, we put people into a growth mindset. We tell them that an ability can be learned and that the task will give them a chance to do that. Or we have them read a scientific article that teaches them the growth mindset. The article describes people who did not have natural ability, but who developed exceptional skills. These experiences make our research participants into growth-minded thinkers, at least for the moment - and they act like growth-minded thinkers, too.

Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach concluded that unawareness of failures’ useful information made learning from failure difficult. So they designed an experiment in which participants were helped to identify the useful information in their failures, and this made them more likely to share them.

What Wiseman noticed that day can be seen as a vital element of TPS: a deeply ingrained belief that problem-solving is a team sport. Failures are opportunities for improvement. Competent professionals are expected to successfully execute most of their tasks, so successes are not seen as worthy of colleagues’ valuable time. Hence the “puzzled” look on Mr. Cho’s face. Puzzlement occurred because an expected behavior (share your problems so we can work on them together) didn’t happen, while an unexpected one (bragging) did. What I love most about this story is that Wiseman’s boasting would not have raised an eyebrow in 99 percent of work environments I’ve studied. We are socialized to share accomplishments and good news in front of the boss. Nothing puzzling about it! The most impressive result of TPS in my view is that the system normalizes failure—bad news, requests for help, and problems alike. It creates a community of scientists. Not incidentally, the essence of failing well is thinking like a scientist.

Across his life, Franklin displayed an encoded operating mode of active curiosity. Never content to just ponder, he felt compelled to observe directly, to experiment, to test and measure, to invent, to question, to figure out how the world around him worked— to chase the whirlwind. Franklin charted the Gulf Stream, identified the meteorological forces of storms, and became famous for his experiments with lightning and electricity. He established many of the terms we still use today in discussing aspects of electricity, such as “charge,” “conductor,” “electric shock,” and “battery.