The phrase “failure is a stepping stone” gets repeated so often it starts to sound like a comforting platitude rather than something backed by real data. Two large studies that tracked what actually happened to people after a real, documented failure suggest the phrase holds up better than expected, in fields as different as scientific research and startup founding.
The clearest evidence comes from a 2019 study by Yang Wang, Benjamin Jones, and Dashun Wang, published in Nature Communications. The researchers took advantage of a natural experiment built into how NIH research grants get funded, comparing scientists who scored just below the funding cutoff, a near-miss, to scientists who scored just above it, a narrow win. Because the two groups were separated by only a hair’s breadth in their initial evaluation, any difference in their later careers could be attributed to the setback itself rather than a real difference in ability. A near-miss did raise the odds a scientist would leave the field entirely, by more than 10 percentage points. But among those who stuck around, the near-miss group significantly outperformed the narrow-win group over the following decade. Their papers published in the next two five-year windows attracted 19.4 percent and 12 percent more citations, respectively, than papers from scientists who had actually won the funding.
A second study helps show that this same pattern extends into the world of business, where the stakes and definition of failure are just as concrete. In a 2010 study by Paul Gompers, Anna Kovner, Josh Lerner, and David Scharfstein, published in the Journal of Financial Economics, the researchers tracked a large sample of venture-capital-backed founders across multiple companies to see whether past outcomes predicted future ones. Founders whose first company had succeeded, defined as going public, had a 34 percent chance of succeeding again with their next venture. Founders whose first company had failed still succeeded 23 percent of the time on their next attempt, a rate higher than the 22 percent success rate among people launching a company for the very first time with no track record at all. A failed first venture, in other words, left founders slightly better positioned than never having tried, the accumulated experience outweighed the setback itself.
Together, these two studies suggest that failure, at least among people who don’t give up entirely after it, functions less like a permanent mark against someone and more like a specific kind of fuel. Wang, Jones, and Wang’s research shows that a near-miss in science measurably sharpened the eventual output of the scientists who kept going, outperforming peers who had actually succeeded on the first attempt. Gompers and colleagues’ research shows the same underlying pattern in entrepreneurship, a failed first company left founders with real, usable experience that improved their odds on the next try, beyond what raw luck alone would predict. Between the two, failure looks less like the opposite of success and more like an input into it, provided a person stays in the game long enough to use what they learned.
It’s worth being honest about what these two studies don’t establish. Wang, Jones, and Wang’s research is specific to NIH-funded biomedical scientists, and while the near-miss versus narrow-win design is a genuinely clever way to isolate the effect of setback, it can’t say how the same dynamic plays out in fields with different funding structures or career paths. Gompers and colleagues’ research draws from venture-capital-backed entrepreneurship specifically, a high-resource, high-visibility environment, so the exact percentages may not translate directly to failures in other kinds of professional or personal pursuits.
Within those honest limits, the research offers a genuinely grounded reason to take the old cliché seriously. Failure doesn’t guarantee success down the line, and it does drive some people to quit entirely. But among those who don’t quit, both studies point to the same conclusion, the setback itself becomes part of what makes the next attempt better.