Fear inhibits learning. Research in neuroscience shows that fear consumes physiological resources, diverting them from parts of the brain that manage working memory and process new information. This impairs analytical thinking, creative insight and problem solving.

Catmull is honest and human in acknowledging that failure hurts. Embracing failure is far easier to say than to actually put into practice! “To disentangle the good and bad parts of failure,” he says, “we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.” He points out that it's not enough to simply accept failure when it happens and move on, more or less hoping to avoid it going forward. We need to understand failure not as something to fear or try to avoid, but as a natural part of learning and exploration. Just as learning to ride a bike entails the physical discomfort of skinned knees or bruised elbows, creating a stunningly original movie requires the psychological pain of failure. Moreover, trying to avoid the pain of failure in learning will lead to far worse pain. Catmull: “for leaders especially, this strategy – trying to avoid failure by outthinking it – dooms you to fail.

I’d go so far as to say that insisting on high standards without psychological safety is a recipe for failure—and not the good kind. People are more likely to mess up (even for things they know how to do well) when they’re stressed. Similarly, when you have a question about how to do something but don’t feel able to ask someone, you’re at risk of running headlong into a basic failure. Also, when people encounter intelligent failures, they need to feel safe enough to tell other people about them. These useful failures are no longer “intelligent” when they happen a second time.

Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach conducted five studies to test the hypothesis that failure, rather than promoting learning, actually undermines it. In one study they asked participants a series of questions starting with identifying which of two symbols from a fictional ancient script represented an animal. Afterward, one group of study participants was told, “You are correct” (success feedback). The other group was told, “You are incorrect” (failure feedback). To see how well they learned from each type of feedback, participants were given a follow-up test. This time they were asked to look at the exact same symbols and asked to identify which one represented a nonliving entity. Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Yet those who had been told they were correct in the first round scored higher in their second test than those told their answers were incorrect. Over and over, people learned less from being given information about what they got wrong than about what they got right.

It stands to reason that social media is shaping our behavior in ways that make sharing problems, mistakes, and failures harder than ever. Both research and firsthand accounts focus on the harmful effects of constant exposure to others’ success, fun, and photoshopped perfect looks. Explicit mentions of failure, or failure avoidance, are rare, and social media’s emphasis on unblemished successes further inhibits healthy attitudes toward failure. Spending considerable time on social media creates a risk of seeing ourselves as failures by comparison to the edited lives that others are living.