frame) and told them, “You know, you could think of this as
a 70 percent success rate.” Unlike the first group, they didn’t
change their minds. They were stuck in the negative frame.
The brain can be stubborn, and it has a hard time going from
negative to positive. This research helps explain why, say, star
athletes obsess more about the rare loss than the many wins.
Back to failure. For it to be truly useful, Payne, the leader-
ship coach, says we need to learn from the failure to avoid re-
peating the same mistakes. We need to reframe the experience
from a negative (failure) into a positive (learning opportunity).
As trite as it sounds, maybe there really is power in positive
thinking. Research from Robert Emmons, also a professor of
psychology at UC Davis, suggests that keeping a daily journal
of positive things we’re thankful for — a spouse, an umbrella,
a funny joke from the Lyft driver — can demonstrably boost
our outlook and lower stress. “Our minds have this sort of
fundamental, natural tendency to focus on negative informa-
tion,” Ledgerwood says. “We can train our mind to do it better.
But it really takes some attention and care. Our minds aren’t
going to do it on their own without us intervening.”
This doesn’t happen instantaneously. Failure can be emo-
tional, it can be painful, and Ledgerwood and Payne stress the
importance of acknowledging the loss, as opposed to immedi-
ately flipping it into a positive.
October 9
Central Valley
Clean Tech
Showcase
Take the case of Brenda Horton. She had a million-dol-
lar idea, or maybe even a billion-dollar idea. She launched
a Sacramento-based startup, ProPlanner, a productivity
tool that allowed for easy collaboration across teams. It felt
big. After all, every organization on the planet has teams,
and they could all use a better collaboration tool. “We were
setting it up to be a global company,” she says now, and
envisioned a valuation north of $1 billion. For three years,
Horton and her chief technology officer (her husband) bust-
ed their tails to launch a demo, find beta testers and raise
capital.
And then life got in the way. Horton suffered a loss in the
family, a second loss, and also had an accident that broke
her upper jaw and sent her to the emergency room, which
required surgery and rehab. They lost momentum and strug-
gled to raise capital. The pressure took a toll on the marriage.
She looked at the burn rate, the dwindling funds and did
what sometimes must be done: She dissolved the company
and killed the dream.
Losing ProPlanner was crushing. “It was a loss,” Horton
says, her voice full of emotion. This is something that the
cheery embrace-failure speeches tend to elide. Failure is
hard. Failure can make us question our competence, self-
worth, even identity. So we need to grieve. “Grieving is an
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