You didn’t have to suffer embarrassment or worse. Does this mean we’re able to look more dispassionately at near misses than at actual failures and are thus more able to learn from them? A growing body of research—some of which I’ve contributed to—explores this idea. What you can take away from this research is that framing matters. For instance, how did you think about that close call? Did you see it as a failure (a miss that almost happened) or as a success (a good catch)? If you’ve framed the close call as a success, you’re more likely to tell your colleagues or family about it, making all of you more able to learn from it.

Of course, Glenn and Cooper trained and practiced and honed their capabilities for thousands upon thousands of hours. But it is not the thousands of hours per se that made them such exquisitely designed creatures for flying. It was thousands of hours expended directly in line with a preexisting set of encodings. John Glenn would have trained and practiced just as intently for thousands of hours in chemistry, in pursuit of medical school, or in football, in hopes of an athletic career, but all that energy would have been spent out of frame. John Glenn would maybe have worked just as hard, trained just as much, but he wouldn’t have become John Glenn.

Discovering what you are not encoded for can be just as important as discovering what you are encoded for.

I find it comforting that even the people in this study, with all of their accomplishments, had episodes when they made missteps that temporarily knocked them out of frame. I came to see that errant turns can be helpful for getting into frame. The process of discovery does not allow for a perfect record. You cannot plan or think your way into a life lived perfectly in line with your encodings.

Third, to be fully in frame requires a suitable hedgehog home.

Both Glenn and Cooper flourished in the culture of elite military pilots and NASA astronauts, wherein they could count on the people around them to be reliable, trustworthy, and highly capable. And while their work came with extreme danger, they operated within a system of competence, chock-full of checks and counterchecks, with scientists and specialist engineers and support crews all working together to accomplish a clear mission and decrease risk to the pilot or astronaut in the cockpit.

My attempts to mold him failed, and I felt increasingly frustrated. He thought I’d fire him. Fortunately, for him and me, I began to grasp that he had not failed me; rather, I had failed him by putting him in a role out of frame with his encodings. Furthermore, I felt somewhat responsible for his future; I did not want to see this wonderful young man start his professional life getting fired. So, I began making a series of iterative steps, testing him with different tasks that drew upon what I sensed to be his intellectual gifts, and he showed signs of flourishing.