My Federal Reserve colleagues and I experienced this as we struggled to address a financial and economic crisis that threatened the global economy. We brainstormed and designed a host of programs to unclog the plumbing of the financial system and to keep credit flowing. Not everything worked but we kept at it, and we remained focused on the task at hand.
I learned the lesson during this period that one’s response to the inevitable setbacks matters as much as the balance of victories and defeats. There is an unfortunate myth that success is mainly determined by something called “ability.” But research indicates that our best measures of these qualities are unreliable predictors of performance in academics or employment.