There are few massive success stories that didn’t start with some sort of failure.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos – now the second richest man in the world – had several unsuccessful attempts to create a platform for third-party sellers to list their products before founding the e-commerce giant. Olympic champion gymnast Gabby Douglas credits her missteps on the floor with helping her adopt a resilient attitude.

“This is going to sound weird, but for me, success was failure,” she said. CNBC succeeds. “He was falling seven times. He was making mistakes. That way I could go back to the gym and be like, ‘Okay, what do we need to work on to make sure all areas are covered and reinforced?'”

Failure being a catalyst for success is well documented. But Why Whether failure can lead to better future results is generally misunderstood, says Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of “Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well.”

“There’s a really big misconception about failure, which is that failure and error are the same thing,” she says.

Failure, she says, is when you use your knowledge and resources correctly to achieve a goal, but it just doesn’t work out. On the other hand, error occurs when you stray from a process that has been proven to lead to success.

If you’re baking a cake and accidentally leave out the eggs, that’s a mistake. If you create an entirely new recipe and it doesn’t taste as you hoped, it’s a “productive failure” because it probably taught you something about how to improve the cake on your next attempt .

“There’s a lot of happy talk about how we should celebrate mistakes,” Edmondson said. “We should celebrate productive failures.”

If you take up a new hobby or change roles at work, know that failure is likely. And that’s OK, Edmondson says, as long as you learned something from the process. Productive failure meets four criteria, Edmondson says.

4 pillars of productive failure

1. Takes place in new territory: You are embarking on a project or field in which you have no prior experience. “If I decide to write a brand new book that doesn’t exist yet, that’s new territory, by definition, and there will be failures,” Edmondson says.
2. Working towards a goal: You are clear about what you want to accomplish. This can help you act with intention and track your progress.
3. Backed by research: Just because something is new to you doesn’t mean you should approach it blindly. Do some homework to find out where someone of your skill level should start.
4. No larger than necessary: Don’t exhaust your resources on a project you’re just learning how to tackle. “Let’s say you have a brand new product,” says Edmonson. “We don’t know if it will work or if customers will like it. What you don’t do is announce to the world, ‘We have this new product,’ and deploy it widely.” Instead, take small steps toward your goal so you can correct your course if necessary.

By reframing failure as an essential part of the learning process, you can feel inspired rather than discouraged.

“We should celebrate new knowledge that came in a disappointing way because you were wrong about a hypothesis,” Edmondson says.

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