Experimentation creates tension. It carries a risk of failure. Moreover, when such experiments succeed, and companies innovate, people have to integrate change. The potential of failure and the need for change can terrify people. It can feel like the conflicts from their childhood that folks were programmed to avoid.

The instinct to exhort people to do their best work in challenging times is understandable. It’s tempting to believe that if we just hunker down, we can avoid failure altogether. It’s also wrong. The relationship between effort and success is imperfect. The world around us changes constantly and keeps presenting us with new situations. The best-laid plans encounter problems in an uncertain context. Even when people work hard and are committed to doing the right thing, failure is always possible in a new situation. Sure, sometimes failures are caused by people who are careless or don’t work hard, but even hard work can end in failure when a situation is new and different or some unexpected event happens. Finally, and most perversely, sometimes sheer luck allows you to mail it in and succeed anyway.

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.

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.

One of the useful—and difficult—things about experiments is that they sometimes tell us that we were wrong, that we actually don’t love or can’t make a living from what we thought we wanted to do. That’s when it comes time to close doors. It’s harder than you might think.