When I sat down for my first in-person meeting with Stuart Olsten, our newest board member and the former chairman of Olsten Staffing, he mentioned that he believed success was a better teacher than failure. Like many entrepreneurs, I had been raised to believe the opposite. Surely it was my copious failures and my hard fought lessons that make me a better entrepreneur today. And I said as much to Stuart.

“With failure you know what doesn’t work,” he said kindly. “With success you have proven something does work and can replicate it.”

My knee-jerk response was to doubt Stuart’s wisdom. I felt that success often stems from a culmination of many factors, only some of which I may be consciously aware. For example, timing and serendipity have always seemed to play an important role for me.

In spite of my bias, I didn’t immediately toss Stuart’s comment aside. Something rang true about it. A couple weeks later, I ran across the January issue of Harvard Business Review. And there, as if Stuart himself had planted the article, was Earl Miller, an MIT researcher, saying, “understanding the link to environmental feedback is crucial to improving how people teach and motivate because it’s a big part of how we learn.

“But apparently, we may learn more from success than from failure.” The article went on to describe how MIT had recently published a study documenting how environmental feedback — particularly success — triggers the brain to rewire itself. I could see that, sure. But it was the next part that rocked my world. The brain failed to show any rewiring after failure!

Suddenly my countless nights of self-reflection, endlessly recounting my insipid acts of inexperience and ineptitude flashed before my eyes. You mean my brain didn’t profit from any of my self-flagellation or sleeplessness?!

The research, which involved monkeys and a simple learning task, seems to have demonstrated that neurons in the prefrontal cortex and striatum *only* rewired themselves after a win. After failure, the monkey’s brain didn’t seem to store anything.

The study seems to suggest, as Stuart had alluded, success is a better teacher than failure. When we win, the brain is more likely to remember what we did right. In contrast, we are not likely to remember what led us to fail unless there were serious consequences (e.g., broken nose, a flaming car).

What Miller concludes is that: “… the brain will learn from success, so you don’t need to dwell on that. You need to pay more attention to failure and … [understand] why you failed.”

Oh, thank goodness! My countless nights of endless fretting were not for naught. I was simply rewiring my incorrigible brain to store the reasons for my failure. (Darn you brain, rewire already!)

Given that I have spent nearly a quarter of my life with a pillow over my head reliving — again and again — the causes of a given failure, it’s certainly nice to know that it has been time well spent.