Of course, if we were able to watch a great athlete training, or a great writer writing, or a great coder coding, we would see that honing a strength is hard work—it is by no means easy to find that incremental margin of performance when you are already operating at a high level—and that a strength is not where we are most “finished” but in fact where we are most productively challenged. Yet we are told to resist the temptation to “just” play to our strengths, and instead to work constantly on our weaknesses. In common parlance, we are told to avoid “running around our backhand.” This betrays, perhaps, a misunderstanding of what a strength actually is. It is not, for each of us, where performance is easiest—it is where performance is most impactful and increasing.

Not long ago I was interested to read about Marina Semyonova, a great Russian dancer and teacher, who devised a novel way of selecting her students. It was a clever test for mindset. As a former student tells it, “Her students first have to survive a trial period while she watches to see how you react to praise and to correction. Those more responsive to the correction are deemed worthy.”

In other words, she separates the ones who get their thrill from what’s easy - what they’ve already mastered - from those who get their thrill from what’s hard.

But Wie disagreed. She wasn’t going there to groom her confidence. “Once you win junior tournaments, it’s easy to win multiple times. What I’m doing now is to prepare for the future.” It’s the learning experience she was after—what it was like to play with the world’s best players in the atmosphere of a tournament.

After the event, Wie’s confidence had not suffered one bit. She had exactly what she wanted. “I think I learned that I can play here.” It would be a long road to the winner’s circle, but she now had a sense of what she was shooting for.

The elders in the community would share some insights, some wisdom,’ he continued. ‘There was one that a friend of mine, a mentor, gave that has stuck with me for a really, really long time.’ The mentor, Chris, was a skilled chess player and he’d drawn some analogies between chess and life. ‘He shared this concept of a strategic retreat.’ There are times both in chess and in life, when you’re going down a certain path, and you hit a roadblock. And then you realize that the moves you’re trying to make aren’t working out. ‘At those times, I have to abandon that game plan and re-strategize, and make a strategic retreat and take a different plan of attack.

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.