What conditions or circumstances are required to render failure benign?

Are you saying the "winning failures" have access to these resources while the "losing failures" do not? If so, how does one gain access to these levers of success?

What really insulates people from the worst consequences of their own failures is money and power.

But mostly money.

And most of the advice rich people give to the poor boils down to :

Get
More
Money.

I can certainly see that as being part of it. If someone (say not-yet-President Donald Trump) loses $50 million in a business venture, it's sure a lot easier to pick up, dust off, and try again when you still have $300 million in the bank. That's more difficult when you've invested all your life savings and everything you could mortgage into the failed venture.

True thing.

Peace and victory to you, Cousin Itt !

Live long & prosper Brother Wilson.

I chose Trump because he's perhaps the most visible example of this phenomenon. but I see the notion of "failure is just one step on the way to success" being pushed in multiple domains.

I disagree with your characterization of my failure examples as extreme. I think they are fairly common. Divorces are often devastating. People who are employed in fairly specialized fields can't just "get another job" if one employer fires them, because the limited number of employers all talk to each other. Getting into highly competitive educational educational institutions requires going beyond excellence to exceptional, and a single f**k-up can get an applicant culled from the huge number of applicants with pristine records. Etc., etc., etc.

Now, it is true that many people who suffer such setbacks figure out ways to redirect their lives and find other careers, other business opportunities, other romantic relationships, etc. But many are not so lucky.

Just to cite one example, this study of people in the USA indicates only 1 out of 10 people who lose a job after the age of 50 ever finds another job which pays as well as their previous one.

https://www.propublica.org/article/older-workers-united-states-pushed-out-of-work-forced-retirement

How does that statistic fit into the "failure is just a learning experience" narrative? Not very well, I would think.

I do thank you for commenting on my question. I hope it helps to stimulate further comments from others. This post was edited by SaltyPebble at December 21, 2019 3:59 PM MST

I agree that such failures are common - but I still see them as extreme.

For instance - the majority of people don't totally fail at school. Those who do have nearly endless opportunities to make up this deficit through adult education and evening classes. It's not uncommon for a kid to do poorly at school due to emotional problems at home, but later in life, they return to education and end up with a qualification and a career.

Two out of three marriages end in divorce - but the majority of divorces are now pretty equitable. The ex-spouses agree on how to split their property and how to time share the care of their kids. Many people are succeeding with blended families in remarriages. To be a divorcee is no longer shameful. 
Probably the most common divorce is rooted in the fact that they got married for the wrong reason: the couple fell in love - and didn't realise how ephemeral lust is, how it wears off.
Then the real factors of personality and compatibility come to the fore, and within two years they're at the stage of make or break conflict. It's not so much failure as immaturity.
This is where the opportunity to learn comes in. If they make the efforts to look outside their relationship to learn communication and problem-solving skills, they'll have a chance of coming through the first crises successfully, and the relationship will be richer and deeper for it. If they don't make the effort and spiral down into blame and acrimony, the matrimony dies.

People often get divorced not because their marriage "failed" but because the couple grew in different directions. For instance, one of them discovers he or she is happier being gay.
Or sometimes the partners discover they have incompatible values or goals. One wants kids, the other doesn't - they didn't think to discuss it beforehand. 
It's only the worst divorces - where rage, vengeance and ill-will have accumulated - that end in the kinds of financially and emotionally ruinous rituals of the court system.

I agree that jobs in specialized fields are limited in number and scope.
However, it is not a failure to get a less well-paid job in a less specialized field.
I agree that losing a job late in life makes it much harder to get another job. There's plenty of research that has shown that employers are ageist.

I have an anecdote that fits your scenario. A dear friend, 50 years old at the time, had risen through the social-work hierarchy to become the regional head of department. Recent funding cutbacks meant he had to take on some of the casework. One of his clients was an 18-year-old with a long history of cutting, anorexia and suicide attempts - DSM5 comorbidities depression, anxiety, PTSD and Narcissistic Personality Disorder. She fell in love with him due to the intimacy of sharing of her problems with him. She had no license or transport, so one day he gave her a lift to one of her appointments. (This is a no-no in the profession - a caseworker is at risk if alone in a car with a client.)
When they'd parked at her destination, she attempted to tongue kiss him. He put the breaks on and ordered her out of the car. She flung herself at him with tears and tantrum. He leaned across, opened the passenger door and pushed her out of the car. She charged him with rape and assault. He lost his job, ended up in gaol for six months, and was raped and battered there. The girl was later discovered to be still a virgin, and an independent witness came forward who corroborated his story. But he came out of it with PTSD, and all the other losses. The only miracle is that his marriage and family are still in tact. Despite having been cleared, the legal requirements of the profession mean he can no longer get work in the fields of social services or psychology. He has suffered awful blows to his self-esteem and self-confidence.
Today he does odd jobs - gardening, house repairs, cleaning, and barista shifts - all casual and paying less than a third of his previous hourly wage. His wife now pays most of the mortgage and the costs for their four kids.
When he looks back over his career failure, he acknowledges that he had become complacent, cocky, and arrogant. He had assumed that he was so experienced and skilled that no client's manipulative behaviours could get to him. He had given many lifts to many clients and decided that the rule against it was an unnecessary example of bureaucratic paranoia.
But despite his reduced circumstances, he has become a wiser person. He has faced his misfortunes. While he does his odd jobs, he's back at uni and studying. Fifty is late to start a new career - but we tend to live much longer now - and if he chooses a profession where he can be his own boss, he'll be able to earn his living without the sayso of others. I call this a success.

Success, in my view, is not measured by prestige, money, power etc.
It's measured by inner qualities - how well we deal with the challenges we meet in life.
And they start at the micro-level. The whole is always much more than the sum of its parts - so every tiny choice and action makes a difference.


This post was edited by inky at December 21, 2019 5:08 PM MST

Thanks again for your perspective.

I think your focus is somewhat different than what I was looking for in this question (which is OK, I cannot demand people who respond take the path I would wish).

Let's use your ex-social worker friend as an example. Suppose we knew of another social worker who was equally (or more) cavalier about following professional guidelines, yet when that person experienced a similar incident, that person not only did not lose the job or face criminal charges, but was instead promoted.  How would you react to such a situation?

That's what I see as the crucial asymmetry with respect to failure. Some people just seem to shrug it off, suffer little to no social consequence, and are given further opportunities to do pretty much what they did before (I know of an instance of an airline CEO who oversaw three airlines going into bankruptcy, then was hired by a fourth airline). Others, like your friend, have to dramatically change their lives and readjust how the define "success" for their own personal sanity (BTW, the fact your friend's marriage stayed intact is a minor miracle. That's very much the exception in situations like his).

I'm not sure what circumstances produce "positive failure" (in the sense of minimal social consequence) instead of "negative failure" (such as your friend's case).

It might simply be randomness (i.e. in any large number of "failures", some of those "failures" will be minimally consequential) combined with Survivorship Bias/Base Rate Neglect (i.e. 99 out of 100 "failure" entrepreneurs go broke and adjust their lives, while the one entrepreneur who fails into success gets interviewed on NPR and gets to talk about how integral failure was to her success). But I'm trying to explore to see if their are other explanations.