" Try again, fail again, fail better,” said Samuel Beckett, while Barack Obama implored us to “let your failures teach you”. For Winston Churchill, “it is the courage to continue that counts”, and for Maya Angelou, it’s the chance to “know who you are and what you can rise from”. Failure means many things to different people, but for the far-sighted, it’s about one key thing: building resilience.

“When I hear the word resilience, I think of being able to get up or to persevere, even when things don’t go the way we’d like them to,” says Katie Richardson, Grade 9 to 12 counsellor at ZIS. “It’s about learning along the way and figuring out what you have to adjust to keep going.”

Everyone will suffer setbacks in life: to be human is to experience heartbreak, failure and disappointment, after all. But resilience is about what comes after those difficult moments. For Professor Dr Manu Kapur, Director of the Singapore-ETH Centre (SEC) and author of Productive Failure, resilience happens when we adapt to a ‘rupture’ in our lives. “That adaptation leads to restructuring and reorganisation, and you should come out even stronger. That is resilience.”

The process begins very early in our lives, but at that point we’re comfortable with the concept of struggle. As we learn to walk, we frequently fall, picking ourselves up and trying again. We stumble over sentences as we try to talk. We flounder in the water as we learn to swim.

But as we get older, a fear of failure creeps in. Then at school, the stakes suddenly feel higher. “Students want to be very good at things right away,” says Katie. “I feel like there’s less and less willingness to fail.”

She thinks a rapidly changing world has left students craving security. “They gravitate towards wanting to control things, but, unfortunately, that makes you more rigid when you actually need to be flexible. More and more, kids have this idea that everything should be linear. If I do this, then this will be the outcome. But that’s not really what life is like. There’s going to be all kinds of twists and turns that you don’t know are coming yet.”

Part of her job is helping students to see the bigger picture. “It’s a process,” she says. “It’s planting seeds of ‘What does success really mean?’. Resilience can mean getting back up or it can be being brave enough to explore new ideas.”

Adults can play a crucial role in normalising life’s speed bumps. “By sharing our experiences of when things went wrong, what we learned, and the amazing things that came out of something that initially went badly, we can encourage them to try again.” It’s why ZIS often invites specific alumni back to school to talk about their unconventional career paths, showing that life doesn’t always go the way you first expected. “Being a little honest and vulnerable can go a long way.”

Dr Kapur understands why students are scared of getting things wrong, but says a fear of failure can actually hinder learning. “If you’re overly focused on success when you’re first learning something new, that kind of mindset is actually detrimental for learning.”

In the era of AI, the value of learning has become even more pertinent. “Today you can just go straight to the source and get the answers or explanations, but you will not have learned much,” says Dr Kapur. “You will not have learned in a way that you deeply understand, because you didn’t go through that sense making, meaning making, and struggle.”

He has developed a model of teaching that encourages short-term failure, harnessing it to foster creativity, learning and growth. Called Productive Failure, it creates a safe space for learning, where students are allowed – and even encouraged – to struggle and fail at solving a problem first, before they are taught the correct method. The result, he says, activates prior knowledge, exposes gaps in your understanding, makes you more ready to understand the correct solution later, and leads to better long-term learning, even if performance looks worse at first.

“We designed these carefully curated, challenging problems that are very intuitive, yet when students try to solve them, they won’t get to the correct answer. That expectation of failure is made very clear to them.” Once students have experimented themselves, they’re then given instruction, leading to a deeper understanding. “Every attempt at solving the problem reveals something interesting, especially when your solution does not work.”

Of course, life will go on to throw much bigger curveballs than struggling to solve a maths problem or getting a disappointing test result. But Dr Kapur is hopeful that this introduction to resilience can help prepare students for bigger challenges. “If you’ve experienced failure in a safe way, and you’ve seen the productive part of it, and you’ve normalised struggle and pain a little bit, I don’t see how that will not prepare you to better deal with the bigger failures.”

Tobi Klein, Class of 1999 (1993-99), agrees that while roblems and setbacks are inevitable, it’s how you deal with them that counts. For him, resilience is about having a positive mindset. “I think it’s also important that you don’t fear failure,” he says. “Everybody wants growth without failure. Everybody wants solutions without problems. But taking risks is important if you want to get somewhere.”

Tobi is the HR director at a financial services company, and when he’s hiring, he’s looking at mindset as much as he is hard skills. “I want people who take accountability, own their mistakes, and focus on solutions,” he says. “People who learn every time they stumble, and then grow and progress. Self-reflection is a very important part of that.”

Resilience is often equated with toughness – some think that to be resilient is to let adverse events simply bounce off you, as if you are clad in armour – but Katie actually thinks it’s the opposite. “You have to really sit with what’s happened and ask: ‘OK, what am I going to do now?’”

For Tobi, resilience can also involve taking the time to define your values, making sure your career and life are aligned with them. “You can always get up and keep running, right? But you have to know what it is you’re running after.”

This authenticity is something Katie focuses on with students, helping them to ground themselves in who they are and what values are important to them. “It’s really important to try to help them identify that because that will help them then get back up again – because they’re still who they are, no matter what happens.”