IMS President Michael Kosorok writes:

I recall as a young assistant professor, reading a book in the university library on empirical processes, and trying to learn the concepts, when a senior professor walked up to me and said (approximately): “You should stop wasting your time on this, just accept the fact you will never learn this material, and move on.” I quickly woke up from this dream (thankfully, it was only a dream), and sat up in my bed, feeling very angry. It was at that point that I made an intensely felt commitment to work harder on learning this area, including working through any needed preliminary material. For full disclosure, I also want to point out that the professor in my dream, who was actually on the faculty at the time, would never have said something so devastating and would have been (and was) very supportive of junior faculty, including me. The other caveat I want to make is that anger is probably not the best primary motivator, but it can be useful sometimes.

Before I moralize more on this dream story, I want to tell another story, which was not a dream. I was still a young assistant professor, and I had just received a polite rejection letter from the Annals of Statistics. The letter writer was Larry Brown, who was one of the co-editors at the time. Even though I was very, very disappointed, I couldn’t help but notice how thoughtfully and carefully worded the letter was, how clearly the issues were laid out, and how the underlying tone was one of kindness. This experience and realization motivated me to move forward, work on the things I needed to, and get back at it.

These stories illustrate both bad and good mentoring (although the bad example wasn’t even real), but they also illustrate the role of failure and fear of failure in our academic and professional development. Failure in this context can take on many forms, including finding a fundamental flaw in a proof, having trouble getting simulations and data analyses to yield meaningful results, paper rejections, grants not getting funded, difficulties with promotion, and so on. For most of these kinds of failures, there are valuable things we can learn from them which can help us make real progress in the big picture of our research program, and in our overall research excellence, potentially changing directions as needed. Most superstar researchers I know have worked on very difficult problems that required managing short-term failures on a regular basis. Failure in these settings, as well as in many other settings, can be viewed as indications of real progress. Failure can also be a sign that we are not avoiding the hard parts of the research process. However, an important warning to give here, is that experiencing failures without learning from them can be very counterproductive and even harmful.

As mentors, we can help others learn how to manage and progress from—and be less afraid of—failures. I have been privileged to benefit from many mentors, many of whom helped me gain perspective about failure experiences. I won’t name them here, but I want to express appreciation to all of them and all mentors everywhere. Personally, my own mentoring efforts are some of the most meaningful experiences of my career. The role of mentoring is extremely valuable to our profession, not just to help us manage failures, and the accompanying emotional ups and downs, but to help us successfully pursue excellence of the highest caliber.