Under the Category of Advice to Young Economists -- Listen and Learn from Coach K's Words of Wisdom

Coach K and his Duke team suffered a humilitating defeat last week against Clemson.  Coach K called a time-out in the final seconds and asked his players to listen to the Clemson crowd and burn it into their memories.  This was the sound of defeat, a humilitating defeat.

In an article in the Washington Post today, John Feinstein examines how Coach K believes that we learn more from failure, and how we respond to it, than we learn from our successes.  It is the loses that provide those pivotal moments.

The great basketball coach John Wooden similarly taught that "Failure is never fatal, but failure to change may be."  It is all about learning and moving on --- develop a plan, then work that plan.

When Dave Prychitko and I were students of Kenneth Boulding, Mr. Boulding told us both once that if economists really wanted to learn we would study the waste baskets of our peers not what gets published in the journals.  Like most "bouldingisms", his statement while odd upon first hearing is actually profoundly true once you think abit about what he is getting at.  We learn much more from our failures than we learn from our successes if we open ourselves on the lesson to be learned.

So to graduate students aspiring to be professional economists.  Learn from your weaknesses, work to develop your comparative advantage as a teacher/researcher, and don't let failure discourage but let it motivate.  When you don't get into the graduate school of your dreams, make the most of the school you do get into. When you don't get the job you had hoped for, learn about how you are selling yourself to prospective employees.  Strive to get honest feedback on what is wrong with your presentation skills.  When your papers don't get accepted in the journals you submit your papers to, learn from the referees and figure out better ways to write up results based on research that exploits your comparative advantage as a scholar.  Take your failures (bad grades, research that doesn't go anywhere, appointments in less than stellar jobs, inability to publish in the right journals, failure to earn tenure, etc.) and learn from them and either adjust aspirations or adjust behavior.  Never blame your failures on others, but always look in the mirror and be accountable.  Being successful is a function of how much you learn from these pivotal moments in the wake of failure.  And also remember that if you have never failed you have not tried hard enough.  So don't be afraid to fail, but be prepared to fail if you have high aspirations and learn from those failures.

Comments

[Richard O. Hammer]

Don't overlook the fact that success also requires aiming at a target which you can hit. When you miss a target it could be that you did not try hard enough. In that case Peter's (and Coach K's) pep talk can help.

But another cause of failure is aiming at a target which you have no chance of hitting. The truth is, I believe, that advocates of a voluntary order face an uphill battle against the established, coercive order. This post "What It Feels Like To Be A Libertarian" by John Hasnas offers support for my case .

I think I have noticed a bias in media, favoring stories of success. For every story like Peter's (now tenured I suppose) I guess there are five others whose story we will never hear. Others who did all the things that Peter says graduate students should do, but who did not succeed and who eventually gave up (or changed their aim, if you want to make a success story of it).

[Roger Koppl]

Oh suck it up, Hammer! No guts, no glory. If you do something worth the trouble, you risk failure. So which shall it be, you try and risk failure or you don't try? Part of Pete's point is that failure is infinitely more likely if you lack the fortitude required to learn from failure. If you blame everything but yourself when you fail, then you will flame out with certainty. If you suck it up, regroup and *learn*, you will surprise yourself with what you can do.

[John Gleason]

It sounds like good advice for anyone, not just for young economists.

[LVDH]

Hammer has a point. Pete´s story is a plea for conformism. Established science is highly conformistic (even intolerant) and so yes, conformism is a safe recipe for professional success. Still it´s not the whole story... Ask yourself whether we would have had men like Galileo and other innovative scientific geniuses if this were the whole story...

[Richard O. Hammer]

Thank you, Professor Koppl, for defending Peter's position from my too hasty response. As you point out, I failed to acknowledge Peter's great coaching, his point that adjusting one's view in response to failure can start a new path to success.

I was grasping at a tangent, an opportunity to introduce a few ideas not in common circulation. But I need to write a longer and better supported case, and to present it in a more suitable medium.

[LVDH]

Hammer:
Your point is entirely clear and convincing.
Austrians, libertarians etc. have less chances of being successful because in some - but only some - respects they are non-conformistic. Boettke, Koppl etc. are actually exceptions to the rule... Or, better perhaps, they have now established a niche in the academic market. But we are still waiting for Austrians being tenured at Yale, Harvard, Columbia...

[Peter Boettke]

Conformism is definitely NOT the message I am preaching. Note my emphasis on finding one's comparative advanatage in scholarship and teaching. That is not conformism, that is finding your unique niche.

In addition, I think it is counter-productive to complain about a glass ceiling both research and teaching wise due to some discrimination against Austrians and libertarians. I do not deny that methodologically and ideoloigically many of us are out of step with the cultural zeitgeist and this presents communication problems. So we just have to work harder, not complain louder!

Here is my bottom-line: we have this great endowment of ideas given to us by the traditions of Austrian economics and classical liberalism. It is similar to having a basketball team full of McDonald All-Americans. When we "lose" in the court of scientific and popular opinion, we should try to learn from that experience. Perhaps we need to think harder, perhaps we need to write clearly, perhaps we have to work on our presentation skills, etc. To insist that the only reason we our losing is because the referees are screwing us, or the fans aren't recognizing our brilliant play, means we are destined to fail. Failure to prepare (a path of improvement) is preparing to fail. So lets figure out a way to improve our scientific presentation, and our teaching abilities. By doing so, we will achieve the individual and collective success that our endowment of ideas suggests we should be achieving.

[Roger Koppl]

Richard,

You are sure okay with me! I respect someone who is willing to recognize it when he hasn't quite hit the target and amend his position accordingly.

And I think I can guess what you were trying to get at, namely, the "zeitgeist" point Pete makes. It's true, we have our work cut out for us. And that does mean you're making a riskier choice than someone whose innovation is to use latest tweak in econometric technique to repeat old bromides. On the other hand, Pete really nailed it when spoke of the "great endowment of ideas" in the Austrian tradition. It's rich, rich, rich and that's is a great strength. We need to improve our skills in delivering those riches to the rest of the academy.