While our stories of others center on who they are, we are much more generous to ourselves in our interpretation of our own actions. When it comes to our self-attributions, we skew the other way, and overascribe our behavior to the external situation around us, to what’s happening to us. If we’re doing something that annoys someone else, then that person is annoyed only because he or she doesn’t understand the situation that’s forcing us to act that way. This tendency is called the Actor-Observer Bias, and it’s one of a number of human-reasoning biases that fall into a category called self-serving biases, because they serve to explain away our own actions in a way that props up our self-esteem.

These biases lead us to believe that your performance (whether good or bad) is due to who you are—your drive, or style, or effort, say—which in turn leads us to the conclusion that if we want to get you to improve your performance we must give you feedback on who you are, so that you can increase your drive, refine your style, or redouble your efforts. To fix a performance problem we instinctively turn to giving you personal feedback, rather than looking at the external situation you were facing and addressing that.

And by the way, if you think about it, much of the world of work is designed this way—it’s designed for Those Other People, who need to be told what to do (hence planning instead of intelligence), whose work needs aligning (hence goals over meaning and purpose), and whose weaknesses put us all at risk (hence the deficit thinking we saw in the last chapter, instead of the focus on distinctive abilities). One of the inconvenient truths about humans is that we have poor theories of others, and these theories lead us, among other things, to design our working world to remedy or to insulate against failings that we see in others but don’t see in ourselves.

There are two parts to any failure: There is the event itself, with all its attendant disappointment, confusion, and shame, and then there is our reaction to it. It is this second part that we control. Do we become introspective, or do we bury our heads in the sand? Do we make it safe for others to acknowledge and learn from problems, or do we shut down discussion by looking for people to blame? We must remember that failure gives us chances to grow, and we ignore those chances at our own peril.

Second, resilient people make more positive attributions about events than those who become anxious or depressed. How they explain failures to themselves is balanced and realistic, rather than exaggerated and colored by shame.

Note that healthy attributions about failure not only stay balanced and rational, they also take account of the ways—small or large—that you may have contributed to what happened. Maybe you didn’t prepare sufficiently for the interview. This is not to beat yourself up or wallow in shame. Quite the contrary; it’s about developing the self-awareness and confidence to keep learning, making whatever changes you need so as to do better next time. Each of us is a fallible human being, living and working with other fallible human beings. Even if we work to overcome our emotional aversion to failure, failing effectively isn’t automatic. We also need help to reduce the confusion created by the glib talk about failure that is especially rampant in conversations on entrepreneurship.

A lack of situation awareness can spawn a variety of preventable failures—usually due to a cognitive bias called naïve realism. As described by Stanford psychologist Lee Ross, naïve realism gives you an erroneous sense that you see reality itself—not a version of reality filtered through lenses created by your background or expertise. It’s a source of overconfidence that can lead to preventable failures. Naïve realism makes us interpret a variable or novel situation as predictable. We’ve already seen examples of this with the child left in the taxi, or my classroom experiences, but perhaps you’ve lost a sale you thought was in the bag or believed a date was going well only to never hear from the person again. Overestimating a situation’s familiarity and underestimating its uncertainty sets us up for failures that are preventable rather than intelligent.