The Difference Between Failure and Quitting

Interviewing Corey Jackson for the Learnit All Podcast was a privilege and a learning experience. I particularly loved the distinction he made between failing and quitting. His key insight reframed failure not as disaster, but simply as reaching one's limit at a given time.  If you lift weights until your muscles fail, you haven’t failed. You’ve just set the number of reps you need to beat next time. Likewise, kids learning to ride a bike fall often. Yet those tumbles help hone balance and control. Failure is integral to growth. 

When trying to accomplish any difficult goal, setbacks and struggle are inevitable. But how we interpret these challenges makes all the difference between learning from failure and succumbing to defeat. The problem arises when we mislabel and misinterpret failure. A fixed mindset sees any setback as permanent inadequacy. This outlook stunts progress by making us fear failure.  

With a growth mindset, we redefine failure as an essential step in the learning process. Just as muscles require resistance to become stronger, abilities expand by testing limits. Each failure provides feedback to refine skills and strategy. And when learning is the goal and when you learn from every experience regardless of outcome, failure becomes impossible. Fear arises when we dread failure. But when we believe no matter what happens we'll have gained wisdom, fear loses its grip.  

Quitting, however, is stopping without pushing your limits – it's the act of giving up before you've truly tested your capabilities. Packing up the bike and leaving it to rust. Never touching those weights again. Quitting cuts short the learning process and robs us of future success. 

Reframing failure as iterative learning shifts our mindset. Just as muscles need resistance to grow stronger, we need challenges to expand our abilities. Each failure offers an opportunity to learn what doesn't work so we can inch closer to what does. We expect setbacks on the path to achievement and welcome them as feedback. We focus not on some final endpoint but on incremental progress. And crucially, we keep trying. 

Failure teaches grit and resilience. Failure strips away ego as we realize nobody succeeds alone. Failure spurs analysis, creativity, and innovation. It cultivates growth mindset, emotional intelligence, and determination. So next time you "fail," avoid framing it as disaster. View it as one step in an ongoing process of learning and improvement. Let failure inform, not deter you. You now have another piece of hard-earned wisdom to build upon. Then get back out there. Failure stops teaching when we allow it to push us into quitting. But when we stay in the game, failures become progress.