Let's Normalize Failure (The Right Kind) | Manu Kapur

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How are we doing today? In an era of rampant and rising perfectionism,

Many people desperately fear failure, but today I'm talking to an expert who says we should be actively seeking out failure, at least the right kind of failure. He calls it productive failure, which is also the name of his new book. The he in question here, the human in question. His name is Manu Kapoor. He's the director of the Singapore ETH Center and a professor for learning sciences and higher education at ETH Zurich, which is in Switzerland.

where he also directs the Future Learning Initiative. We talk about the definition of productive failure, a concept that Manu developed and which allows you to design for and harness failure so that you can learn in a deeper and more effective way. We talk about why we learn more from failing than from succeeding, which is counterintuitive for many of us. The difference between desirable and undesirable failure, the neuroscience of curiosity, practical ways to incorporate productive failure into your life, how to get into your so-called failure zone, how to create environments in which other people feel safe to fail, and much more.

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