Mistakes Are Your Best Teachers
What 12,000 students taught us about learning, growth, and self-discovery. A reflection on a conversation with Dr. David Yeager.
There’s a saying from the Tibetan tradition that says: “the road to Lhasa is up and down.”
The Tibetan plateau is covered with massive mountain ranges. Travelers making the journey to Lhasa, the capital, would have to go up, then down, then up again. There was no straight path.
The teaching here is simple but easy to forget: going up the mountain and going down into the valley are equally progress. It might feel like reaching the peak is the real achievement, and the descent is somehow less significant. But they’re both part of the journey.
If we apply this lesson to our personal journey in life, the point is that although we often assume that we’re headed in the right direction when we feel happy and content, it is often when we’re headed downhill into the valley where the real growth happens. Whether we like it or not, we usually learn through adversity.
I’ve been thinking about this teaching a lot lately after reading a remarkable new study out of the University of Texas at Austin. The lead researcher, Dr. David Yeager, joined us on a recent episode of the Dharma Lab podcast to discuss the findings of a groundbreaking new study, and what the findings mean for all of us, not just students and teachers.
What 12,000 Students Revealed
The study is called FUSE, the Fellowship Using the Science of Engagement. It followed over 12,000 middle and high school students across Texas for an entire academic year. The goal was to see whether a simple shift in how teachers talk about mistakes could change student outcomes.
The results were striking.
When teachers were trained to treat mistakes not as failures but as opportunities to learn, student performance improved by the equivalent of four additional months of learning. That’s nearly half a school year, from a relatively light-touch intervention.
But what caught my attention was a deeper finding.
The researchers divided teachers into two groups based on their initial mindset. Some teachers had what’s called a fixed mindset, the belief that students’ abilities are mostly set in stone. Others had a growth mindset, believing that all students can develop.
You might expect the fixed-mindset teachers to be the hardest to help. They were. But here’s the twist: When these teachers received training on how to create a culture of learning (as opposed to a culture of judgment and evaluation), their students showed the largest improvements of all. Among their students, the effect size doubled, yielding nearly seven months of additional learning.
In other words, the teachers who seemed most stuck were the ones who could grow the most. And so were their students.
When We Need It Most, We Benefit Most
This finding echoes something we talk about often here at Dharma Lab: the places where we struggle the most are often where the breakthroughs happen.
The study also found that Black students, who reported feeling less respected in classrooms with fixed-mindset teachers, showed particularly strong gains when those same teachers shifted their approach. The achievement gap between Black and White students narrowed by 35%. The gap in feeling respected disappeared entirely.
And there’s one more piece that struck me deeply. Teacher burnout dropped by 50% among the fixed-mindset teachers who went through the program. Their satisfaction with life improved by a quarter of a standard deviation, a meaningful shift on one of the most widely validated measures of well-being in the world.
In other words, changing how we relate to mistakes doesn’t just help students. The effects ripple outward. It heals teachers as well.
A Shift in Perspective
So what actually changed in these classrooms?
The intervention was remarkably simple. There was no fancy new curriculum. No groundbreaking tech. Just shifts in language and framing.
Teachers learned to say things like: “Mistakes give me useful information about what you need.” Or: “Your test score is a snapshot in time, not a prediction of your future.”
They were encouraged to allow students to retake tests after correcting their mistakes. They learned to ask open-ended questions when a student got something wrong, rather than immediately correcting them. To approach errors with curiosity rather than judgment.
That’s it.
And yet these small changes, repeated over time, created what the researchers call a classroom culture focused on learning and growth, one that replaced the default culture that emphasizes the endless evaluation and judgment that most of us experienced in school. (And, if we’re honest, the culture many of us still carry in our heads.)
Beyond the Classroom
This research is about education, but it has implications far beyond the classroom.
How many of us spend our lives afraid of looking foolish? How often do we avoid challenges because we might fail? How much energy do we waste evaluating ourselves, comparing ourselves to some ideal, and coming up short?
The study suggests that this tendency actively limits what we can learn and who we can become.
But here’s the hopeful part: We can change this dynamic, and it’s easier than it might seem.
The path to self-discovery is not about avoiding mistakes. It’s about changing how we relate to them. We learn to shift from judgment to curiosity, from shame to inquiry, and from seeing our missteps as evidence of failure to viewing them as fuel for growth.
This is something we see again and again in contemplative practice. The moments that feel like setbacks are often where insight happens. We might feel like we’re going down rather than up, but we’re learning an important lesson along the way.
Micro-Doses of Flourishing
One thing we’ve learned from our research at the Center for Healthy Minds is that transformation doesn’t require monumental effort. Some of the most powerful changes come from small, simple shifts in perspective, what we call micro-doses of flourishing.
The FUSE study supports this. Teachers didn’t have to overhaul their entire approach. They just learned to pause, reframe, and respond differently in key moments. And those small shifts cascaded into measurable changes in student engagement, performance, and well-being.
The same principle applies to inner work. You don’t need to sit down for an hour, light a stick of incense, and enter a deep state of concentration. Sometimes it’s as simple as noticing something positive about yourself or the person you’re with. Or taking a few calming breaths in the middle of a busy day. These micro-moments add up.
The Bottom Line
Mistakes aren’t obstacles to learning. They’re opportunities for self-discovery and growth.
Big insights often happen when we’re feeling the most stuck, burnt out, or overwhelmed.
Small shifts in perspective can produce large changes in outcomes.
When we meet difficulty with curiosity instead of judgment, everyone benefits, including ourselves.
Practice: A Nighttime Reflection
Here’s a simple practice to weave into your bedtime ritual:
Step 1: Settle. Take a few calming, mindful breaths. Give yourself a moment to simply be. You don’t need to focus or meditate. Just breathe, rest, and let your mind unwind.
Step 2: Recall. Look back on the day. Can you find one thing you said, did, or thought that felt unskillful? A moment when you weren’t at your best? The key here is to let this be powered by curiosity, not judgment.
Step 3: Reframe. If you view this moment as a teacher, what is it telling you? What might you learn from it? How might you approach it differently next time?
Step 4: Intend. Set a clear intention for how you’d like to meet this kind of moment in the future. What might support you in that?
The point here is not to be hard on yourself. It’s to get curious, the way a scientist is interested in data. Or the way a teacher in a culture of learning is interested in a student’s mistake. Missteps and errors are not evidence of inadequacy, but invitations to learn and grow.
The road to Lhasa is up and down. And every step, including the stumbles, moves you forward.
With appreciation,
Cort
Podcast: Check out our recent Dharma Lab podcast episode where Richie and I sit down with Dr. David Yeager, the lead scientific director behind this study, to explore what these findings mean for learning, growth, and self-discovery at any age.
Our New Book Born to Flourish is coming out soon! Many of the ideas in this post connect to themes Richie and I explore in depth in our upcoming book, Born to Flourish, coming out March 24, 2026 from Simon & Schuster. We’ll be sharing more about the book in the months ahead.
Reflection: What’s your relationship to mistakes? Is there a recent one that, with some curiosity, might have something to teach you? Drop us a comment. We’d love to hear from you.
It took me long time to have a healthier relationship with mistakes. Practicing meditation helped a lot.
Thanks so much for sharing the news about the FUSE study. 12,000 students over an academic year is a lot of data capture - fantastic!
I really appreciate the simplicity of shifting language and bringing open questions and discussion into the classroom. The impact of seeing mistakes as failure is just tragic, so having such a sturdy study that will ripple out into the world should have real impact.
Contemplative practices, the more I learn about them, the more I understand just how vital they are to human flourishing.
One other point I can recommend to the nighttime reflection is a simple visualisation. It’s something that’s helped bring energy into my intention setting.