The Failure of Exceptional Athletes and Scientists

Image of athletes and scientists — We are studying exceptional achievement among scientists and athletes and how failure experiences have shaped their path to success. We interviewed Nobel Laureates and exceptional athletes to understand the strategies that they used to benefit from their failure experiences.

Research Spotlight: “Even Einstein Struggled”

Students’ beliefs that success in science depends on exceptional talent negatively impact their motivation to learn. For example, such beliefs have been shown to be a major factor steering students away from taking science and math courses in high school and college. In the present study, we tested a novel story-based instruction that models how scientists achieve through failures and struggles.