Publish at March 31 2026 Updated March 31 2026
If you're a parent, or if you've had a baby recently, you'll have seen how learning to walk works. A child around 10, 12 or 14 months old will try to take his first steps. His legs tremble, his arms splay like two clumsy pendulums and his gaze fixes on a landmark in front of him with absolute intensity. He lets go of the edge of the sofa. One step. Two steps. Then the floor. He falls, sits heavily on his buttocks, looks up at you and does it again. Without negotiation. Without a skills assessment. Without fear of others.
This banal scene hides a powerful entrepreneurial truth: children don't experience failure as something personal or an inability. He treats it as a logistical fact. The fall is not a verdict on his worth, it's a piece of set-up information. Why, as we grow up, do we lose this capacity for experimentation? Why do mistakes become a threat to self-image rather than something to be corrected? This is precisely the question that this article addresses.
The work of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth on attachment theory has highlighted a fundamental paradox: it is because children have a secure base that they dare to explore. Infants who know that a reliable adult is present take risks. They wander off, stumble, return and set off again. Safety doesn't eliminate risk-taking, it makes it possible.
Source: https: //shs.cairn.info/revue-enfances-et-psy-2015-2-page-14?lang=fr
For the adult, this secure base is internal. It takes the form of emotional autonomy: the ability to get through discomfort without collapsing, to recognize emotions without being overwhelmed by them. A threatening inner environment, nourished by harsh internal discourse and paralyzing perfectionism, literally shuts the brain off to new information.
Neuroscience confirms what Bowlby intuited: under chronic stress, the amygdala takes control and the prefrontal cortex, the seat of creativity and problem-solving, takes a back seat.
Resilience, in this context, does not come from brute strength or the ability to take things in stride. It comes from the quality of the safety net we've created, or even just the feeling of safety. This safety net may consist of trusting relationships, regular reflective practice (metacognition) or a firm grounding in one's own values. It's what makes daring possible. Without it, error remains a threat. With it, they become information once again.
Psychologist Carol Dweck has formalized one of the most useful distinctions in contemporary psychology: the opposition between a fixed state of mind and a developmental state of mind. In the former, intelligence and talent are perceived as fixed capacities. Failure becomes an indicator of fundamental incompetence. In the second, aptitudes are seen as muscles that can be developed through effort and repetition. Failure is no longer a verdict, it's training.
Source : https://www.academia.edu/43966951/Mindset_The_New_Psychology_of_Success_Corol_S_Dweck_
A child learning to walk is naturally in this developmental frame of mind. He doesn't tell himself he's a "bad walker". He walks, falls, adjusts, starts again. This virtuous cycle is his daily reality. Adults, on the other hand, have progressively integrated systems of social judgment that have superimposed a layer of interpretation on every mistake. School, the gaze of peers and constant comparisons have transformed the fall into shame.
Fear of judgment creates a cognitive closure that makes it impossible to negotiate with oneself, and we prefer not to try rather than risk confirming a negative self-image. Recovering the development mindset therefore involves active unlearning: unlearning the equation "error = incompetence" and replacing it with "error equals useful information". This is a rigorous epistemological posture.
Albert Bandura introduced the concept of self-efficacy: an individual's belief in his or her ability to organize and execute the actions necessary to achieve a given goal. This belief is not an innate personality trait. It is built, reinforced and can be rebuilt at any age, from four main sources:
Source: https: //www.academia.edu/28274869/Albert_Bandura_Self_Efficacy_The_Exercise_of_Control_W_H_Freeman_and_Co_1997_pdf
The most powerful source is the direct experience of mastery. Every time a child gets up after a fall and takes another step, he accumulates evidence of getting up again. His mind records:
I tried, I failed, I got up, I progressed.
It is this capital of evidence that is the real driving force behind self-confidence.
In the entrepreneurial context, this principle is decisive. You don't succeed because you don't fall. You build a path to success because you have accumulated sufficient evidence of your own ability to get back up again. Each pivot, each failed product, each lost customer can become part of the edifice, provided they are analyzed with lucidity rather than shunned with shame. The resilient entrepreneur is one whose stock of evidence of recovery is richer than his record of defeat.
Functional fixation is a well-documented cognitive bias: we tend to perceive an object or situation solely through its usual function, which prevents us from imagining other uses for it. Learning to take objects or ideas apart into their simplest parts, as suggested by educational research, frees us from these fixed conceptions, enabling us to rediscover our natural creativity and greater confidence in our problem-solving abilities.
Source : https://cursus.edu/fr/26560/demontage-fixation-fonctionnelle-et-creativite
A child learning to walk is not a victim of this fixation. He instinctively grabs a chair and turns it into an improvised walker. He diverts every object from its conventional use to serve his goal of the moment. This cognitive plasticity is precisely what adults need to relearn.
For the entrepreneur, a setback is not just an obstacle to overcome. It's an object to be taken apart in order to uncover its hidden components. A project that fails may reveal a misunderstood market need, an unexpected network of contacts, a skill developed in a hurry, or a new strategic direction.
To see in failure another function, a possible pivot, a transferable lesson or a new network, is exactly to break your own functional fixation. It's transforming the problem into a resource.
Researcher Saras Sarasvathy has developed the concept ofeffectuation, based on the study of expert entrepreneurs. Unlike classical causal logic, which starts from a defined objective to plan the necessary resources, effectuation starts from available resources to imagine possible objectives.
One of its founding principles is that of acceptable loss: rather than calculating the expected return on investment, the expert entrepreneur determines what he or she is prepared to lose, and acts within this limit.
A baby learning to walk has no business plan. He hasn't modeled his motor growth trajectory over eighteen months. He uses the means at hand: his still unstable legs, the furniture at hand, the energy available. He makes his way by walking, in the most literal sense of the word.
This posture is that of the expert described by Sarasvathy: accepting the unpredictable not as a threat to be neutralized, but as a natural component of the game. Uncertainty is not the enemy of action, it is its terrain. Navigating in this space requires precisely all the abilities mentioned above: a solid, reassuring base, a developmental mindset, self-efficacy built on real evidence, and thinking freed from functional fixation.
The child who learns to walk is the best pedagogical model an entrepreneur can observe. Not because he doesn't fall, but precisely because he falls, again and again, without ever transforming the fall into a definitive judgment of his worth. He experiments, adjusts, starts again. With each rise, he builds a little more confidence and competence.
Rediscovering this willingness to make mistakes in adulthood is not a regression. It requires building a secure inner foundation, cultivating a developmental mindset, accumulating evidence of recovery, breaking one's own cognitive fixations and overcoming uncertainties. This path always begins with the same courageous gesture: letting go of the edge of the sofa.
You might also like:
The impact of robotization on education
How do robots help teachers? Do students' interactions with robots really help them?
Actions to stimulate the youth press in Africa
With a steadily growing young population, the children's print media market offers untapped potential. This article presents the current state of the children's press in Africa, and suggests seven ways to strengthen the sector.
"Learning analytics: Effective in Their Entirety
What about denying learners access to final exams because the algorithm thinks they can't pass? With algorithms, it becomes very easy now to analyze the students' records. However, it is important not to leave the judgment solely to artificial intelligence and to take into account the relevant information.
Fully teaching the ecological transition
While it has been overshadowed by covid-19, the fact remains that the ecological transition is also part of the global crises. Students, even without being adequately trained on the subject, are increasingly recognizing this reality. What if the educational community, including higher education, were to integrate more environmental issues into their curricula?
Defining bullshit: a multi-disciplinary undertaking!
The humanities had relegated this concept to the sidelines of their research sphere. And yet, who never says this word? Bullshit". For some years now, however, emboldened authors have been providing us with insights that go beyond the simple aphorisms of the singer with the pipe and the moustache. And to define the term, psychologists, specialists in cognitive bias, and philosophers of language are called upon.
