A study of young scientists at the start of their careers showed that those who initially failed to land a grant were 6% more likely to publish a successful paper than their initially better-off colleagues.
“What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” This adage, formulated by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, everyone knows it. For the first time, a study tends to bring it a scientific basis.
Published in the journal NatureCommunications and titled Early Career setback and future career impactit shows that setbacks at the start of their professional career can, in the long term, be beneficial and bring more success to those who have experienced them compared to “lucky” people at the start of their professional life.
“It turns out that historically, although we’ve been relatively successful in identifying the benefits of success, we haven’t been successful in understanding the consequences of failure,” says Dashun Wang, author of the work and associate professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, USA.
6% more likely to publish a successful article
To reach this conclusion, the researchers reviewed the files of young scientists who, at the beginning of their career, had applied for a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) between 1990 and 2005. They used the NIH assessment scores to separate individuals into two groups: first the “near misses” whose results were just below the funding threshold and the “just pass” whose results were just above of this threshold.
They then looked at how many papers each group published, on average, over the next ten years and how many of those papers turned out to be hits, based on the number of citations those papers received.
Their analysis revealed that the group of scientists who narrowly missed the grant published as many papers on average, but these publications were more successful than the group of those who got the grant. The researchers even found that the scientists who failed were 6.1% more likely to publish a best-selling paper in the next ten years than the scientists in the group that narrowly won the grant.
Experience and motivation as factors for subsequent success
How to explain this phenomenon ? The researchers wondered if it could be linked to the fact that scientists who failed at the start of their careers have since left research, leaving only the most determined in the world of work. Further analysis that if the dropout rate was 10% higher in the near miss group, this data alone could not explain the greater success later in their careers.
In fact, the researchers could not find any evidence to support their hypothesis, which suggests that some unobservable factors, such as experience, motivation or lessons learned from failure, are to be taken into account. “Failure has value, asserts Dashun Wang. We have only just begun to extend this research to a broader area and we are seeing promising signs of similar effects in other areas,” he concludes.
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