Data science predicts which failures will ultimately lead to success

Oprah Winfrey was fired from her first job in television. Steven Spielberg was rejected from film school multiple times, and Michael Jordan didn't make his high school's varsity basketball team. Stories like these fuel motivational mantras about learning from failure and coming out stronger on the other side. But little research has been done to support these anecdotes, and even less has examined the mechanisms as to how failure leads to success. In a study published Oct. 30 in Nature , data scientists from the University of Chicago and Northwestern University looked at the dynamics of failure in three different areas-science, entrepreneurship and terrorism-and found that the way one fails matters. The researchers found that paths diverge soon after an initial failure: Some individuals go on to achieve eventual success, while others continue to fail until they drop out.