The cover story of the most recent issue of Wired Magazine is dedicated to failure, and why failing can actually be a good thing. The prooftext (and cover model) is Alec Baldwin, whose career has been riddled with failures from which he learned and grew and so on.
But the accompanying story, “The Neuroscience of Screwing Up” is much more impressive, even than Baldwin’s rise to 30 Rock. And it is impressive for the ways it “scientifically” discovers what we humanists have understood about intellectual growth and… well… learning for a long long time.
The essay tells the story of Kevin Dunbar, who conducted an ethnography of bioscience labs at Stanford University, only to reach
an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.)
For most humanists and social scientists, this phenomenon is anything but frustrating. This is what most of us call “discovery” or “learning.” It happens when what we expect to happen doesn’t happen. It’s what happens when what we think we know turns out not to be so. It is what happens when we proceed, methodologically, with real questions we want to understand as opposed to hypotheses we set out to prove.
Finding what you don’t expect to find is a success, not a failure. And perhaps some of the apparent “hard times” of the humanities are not “failures” at all, but the result of stilted and stunted ways of looking at the very processes of research, and not only focusing on the findings.
... and everyday life 
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