Failure is a judgment, and the judgment is personal. That premise runs underneath a Times Well piece in which Anna Borges asked clinicians and failure researchers a narrow question: after a setback, what do you actually hand people?
Ashley Chin, a clinical psychologist in Gainesville, Florida, supplies the definitional version. “Something I consider a huge failure, you might brush off as a small mistake, and vice versa.” What turns a missed target into evidence of personal defect, she says, depends on the messages someone absorbed growing up and on how tightly the outcome is fused to identity. A flop that touches nothing central is a flop. The same flop in the middle of who you think you are is a crisis.
Therapy is the real intervention, and Borges doesn’t pretend otherwise. Books appear as the lower-stakes option, and Amanda Cassil, a clinical psychologist in Pasadena, gives the reason in the language of exposure rather than learning: “In the midst of experiencing failure, we are profoundly vulnerable, and opening ourselves up to others can feel risky. Reading offers comfort and support at a time when we fear getting wounded further.”
Two threads, seven books
The list is short and the picks are doing two different jobs. Some are about strategy; most are about self-directed cruelty, which is what the failure literature tends to be once you scrape the productivity language off it.
Amy Edmondson’s Right Kind of Wrong handles strategy by refusing the standard consolation. Chin likes it because it “challenges the idea that all failures are helpful and productive” — the book separates basic failures (inattention, carelessness, preventable), complex failures (several factors colliding, hard to predict) and intelligent failures (hypotheses that didn’t pan out). Sandhya Krishnan, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock who studies failure, says the taxonomy “walks you through identifying what kind of failure you experienced and then what to do about it.” Only the third kind is worth repeating deliberately.
Kristin Neff’s Self-Compassion and Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance are the anti-cruelty entries. Paul Losoff, a clinical psychologist in Northbrook, Illinois, sends patients to Neff because many “internalize small missteps as big failures because they’re too hard on themselves in general” — “this loud, hypercritical voice in their head telling them they’ve failed.” Chin uses Brach’s exercises in session: “She has so many tools for challenging the perfectionism and self-criticism that surround feelings of failure.” Neither book asks anyone to lower their standards; Losoff is explicit that Neff’s point is that high expectations do not require self-punishment when they go unmet.
The older lineage
Three of the picks predate the genre they now sit in, which is part of why they age better than the newer entries. Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis is from 1974 and is not really about tennis: it is about self-doubt and overthinking, and Cassil uses its instruction in nonjudgmental awareness with clients after hard setbacks. “A lot of the work comes down to the importance of disconnecting failure from your sense of worth as a human.”
Brené Brown’s Rising Strong (2015) works the same seam from social science, via a process — reckoning, rumbling, revolution — that asks the reader to face the feeling, interrogate the story told about what happened, then act on what survives. Chin’s summary is the best line in the article: “The goal isn’t to harden yourself against potential failures but to find the courage to keep taking risks.”
Then there is Viktor Frankl, whose Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) is the one recommendation that reliably triggers an objection. Cassil reports it plainly: “People tend to balk when I recommend it, because there’s this sense of, ‘Well, obviously what I’m going through is not as bad as the Holocaust.’” Her answer is that patients connect with the search for purpose anyway, “especially after a failure leaves them unsure what comes next.”
Carol Dweck’s Mindset supplies the most concrete piece of testimony in the piece. Krishnan read it after leaving medical school before finishing, which broke a plan she had pursued for most of her life: “I always had a fixed mind-set about my education and career, but failing in such an identity-shifting way forced me to figure out what would come next.”
What the list is not
It is a service piece assembled from practitioners’ preferences, not an evidence review — no trial is cited for any of the seven titles, and the psychological literatures behind several of them, from mindset to self-compassion, carry replication and effect-size debates that a reading list cannot hold. The canon is also entirely American and clinical, running from 1946 to 2023.
What survives the caveats is the through-line Borges sets up in her first four paragraphs: the books are mostly trying to loosen the joint between the event and the self, because that joint is where the damage happens. The setback is information about the world. The verdict it seems to deliver about your worth is a story you were already telling.