The setback advantage: why the projects that go wrong matter most
Updated August 2026 · 7 minute read · By Eric Gonzalez-Payne
A student I will call C. built a series of apps for her home market, each one modelled on something that had worked elsewhere. None of them made money. By any ordinary measure it was a run of failures, and when we first spoke she had been advised to keep all of it well away from her applications, on the grounds that it did not look successful.
We did the opposite. The story she eventually told was about the attempts: what she had assumed, what the users actually did, what she had understood by the fourth version that she could not have understood at the first. She went on to computer science at Berkeley. The projects that had failed were the reason.
This surprises parents and it should not. Anyone can tell a story about a thing that worked. Very few eighteen year olds can tell an honest, specific story about a thing that did not, because it requires them to have noticed what was happening at the time, and to have stayed long enough to learn something from it.
What a setback proves that a success cannot
A finished, successful project proves competence and follow through, which is a great deal. A recovered setback proves something no successful project can: that this person keeps going when the reward disappears. Universities, employers, and anyone choosing who to work with are all making the same bet, which is about what happens on the bad days rather than the good ones.
There is a second thing, less discussed. A student who can describe their own mistakes precisely has demonstrated self awareness in the only way it can be demonstrated, by example rather than by claim. Every applicant says they are reflective. Almost none of them can show the moment they changed their mind.
Why it has to be written down at the time
Here is the practical problem, and it is the reason this article exists. Setbacks do not survive memory intact. Ask a seventeen year old about the project they abandoned at fourteen and you get a shrug and a summary. The texture is gone: what they actually thought was happening, what they tried first, the specific afternoon they nearly stopped. Three years later, all that remains is the fact that it did not work.
The families who can tell these stories well are not the ones who had better setbacks. They are the ones who wrote something down within a week of it happening. That is the entire difference, and it costs about ten minutes.
The four questions, asked once, soon after
When something has clearly gone wrong, wait until it is no longer raw, usually a few days, and then ask these four, in the child's own words, and save the answers with the date. What happened? Why do you think it happened? What did you try? What is different now?
Do not editorialise, do not improve their phrasing, and do not turn it into a lesson. The value is in the fact that a fourteen year old said it, at fourteen, in fourteen year old language. Written up later by an adult, it becomes worthless, and any experienced reader can tell.
Then, and this is the part almost nobody does, go back a year later and ask one more question: reading that now, what do you see? The gap between the two answers is the growth, dated at both ends, and it is the most persuasive artefact a young person can own.
What this asks of parents
Mostly it asks you not to fix things. A parent who rescues a failing project, or quietly replaces it with an easier one, has removed the raw material. It also asks you to treat the record of a setback as neutral rather than shameful, which children read instantly from tone. If recording a failure feels to them like being filed under a mistake, they will stop being honest, and honest is the whole value.
Worth saying plainly: none of this means letting a child suffer needlessly. Support the person, protect the project's difficulty.
Distinction records setbacks as a first class part of a young person's record, with those same four questions and a yearly revisit, so the growth is visible at both ends. You can see it inside three student journeys, read how to help your child find a real project to begin one, or read your own child in three minutes, free.
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