Growth, it turns out, is actually a question not of figuring out how to gain ability where we lack it but of figuring out how to increase impact where we already have ability. And because our abilities are diverse, when you look at a great performance you see not diversity minimized but rather diversity magnified; not sameness but uniqueness.

The key to understanding performance is to stop thinking of it as a broad abstraction, and instead start finding elements of it that we can measure reliably and act on usefully.

Therefore we know a) that the ability to learn exists in us all, b) that it shows up differently in each of us, and c) that while we can all get better at anything, none of us will ever be able to rewire our brains to excel at everything. More simply, we can all get better, and we will all get better at different things, in different ways, and at different speeds.

But before we go any further, a few definitions are in order. I define failure as an outcome that deviates from desired results, whether that be failing to win a hoped-for gold medal, an oil tanker spilling thousands of tons of raw oil into the ocean instead of arriving safely in a harbor, a start-up that dives downward, or overcooking the fish meant for dinner. In short, failure is a lack of success.

In a very different study with similar conclusions, my colleagues Bradley “Brad” Staats and Francesca Gino—then professors at the University of North Carolina—studied how seventy-one surgeons learned from failure versus success on a total of 6,516 cardiac surgeries in ten years. The surgeons learned more from their own successes than from their own failures, but learned more from others’ failures than from others’ successes. This effect—again ego protecting—was less pronounced if a surgeon had a history of personal success. Failures presumably stung less sharply with that cushion of prior success.