Early Career Failures: Do They Make You Stronger?

Source: Osan Air Base

We all have heard the old adage: What doesn't kill you will make you stronger. Researchers at Kellogg School of Management have tested whether that is indeed true when it comes to early career failures. They did so by examining a very unique dataset. Dashun Wang, Benjamin Jones, and Yang Wang have examined research grants provided by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  The paper, published recently in Nature Communications, is titled, "Early Career Setback and Future Career Impact."  The scholars compared scientists awarded grants early in their career to those who narrowly missed out on achieving a grant.  Here is what they found, as summarized by Kellogg Insight:

To figure out just how much of a difference these early successes or setbacks made to a scientific career, the researchers traced the careers of 623 near-miss and 561 narrow-win scientists.  Notably, it turned out that the two groups published at similar rates over the next 10 years—not what you’d expect, given that narrow winners got an early leg up from their NIH grant funding. Even more surprising, scientists in the near-miss group were actually more likely to have “hit” papers (that is, papers that cracked the top-five percent of citations in a particular field and year). In the five years after they applied for NIH funding, 16.1 percent of papers produced by scientists in the near-miss group were hits, compared to 13.3 percent for the narrow-win group.

The researchers went on to rule out some of the possible explanations for this finding.  For instance, they demonstrated that the finding is not attributable to attrition by the "near-miss" scientists... i.e., it is not explained by quitting on the part of some of the researchers who did not receive grants early in their career.  They conclude that the career paths of these "near-miss" scientists suggests that they indeed did become stronger through adversity.  Somehow, the early career failure inspired them to persevere, led to key learnings, and/or helped them understand their own strengths and weaknesses.   As a result, they overcame the failure and went on to achieve considerable success.  What an uplifting finding for all of us... the old adage is not just a cliche...there is real truth there apparently!