Through the Character: perseverance, failure and knowing when to change the plan

There are few characters more committed to a goal than Wile E. Coyote.

The plan fails. The contraption backfires. Gravity inevitably has something to say about it. Yet, somehow, tomorrow brings another plan.

There is something strangely admirable about that. Wile E. Coyote is repeatedly confronted with failure and still refuses to let failure become the final word on what he is capable of doing next. For a character whose schemes so reliably go wrong, he is remarkably difficult to discourage.

Psychology has spent considerable time asking what allows some people to continue working towards a goal despite setbacks. Duckworth and colleagues (2007) described grit as perseverance and passion towards long-term goals, finding that sustained effort was associated with achievement across several different settings. The basic idea is familiar: success often requires the ability to tolerate frustration, disappointment and periods in which progress is difficult to see.

But Wile E. Coyote also gives us a reason to complicate that message.

Perseverance is not necessarily the same thing as repeating the same strategy indefinitely.

Research by Wrosch and colleagues (2003) suggests that adaptive self-regulation can sometimes involve recognising when a particular goal has become unattainable, disengaging from it, and redirecting efforts towards another meaningful goal. In other words, there may be psychological value in knowing both when to keep going and when to change direction.

Perhaps, then, the most interesting thing Wile E. Coyote can teach us about perseverance is not simply that we should always try again. It is that after failure, we still have a choice about how we try again.

What happens psychologically when we fail?

Failure does more than tell us that something did not work. It also gives us information about ourselves – and what we do with that information can shape what happens next.

Research associated with Carol Dweck’s work on mindsets suggests that people differ in how they interpret mistakes and setbacks. When ability is understood as something that can develop, a mistake can become information: something went wrong, so what can be changed next time? Research by Moser and colleagues (2011) found that people with more of a growth mindset showed greater attention to their mistakes and better accuracy immediately afterwards. Later work with children has found a similar relationship between growth mindset, attention to errors and improved performance following mistakes.

That does not mean that simply telling ourselves to “have a growth mindset” makes failures painless, nor does it mean that every setback can be overcome through effort alone. Failure can be disappointing, embarrassing and exhausting. Sometimes circumstances genuinely limit what is possible. What matters is that failure does not have to become a verdict on the person who experienced it.

There is a considerable psychological difference between “that plan failed” and “I am a failure”. The first leaves room for information, adjustment and another attempt. The second turns an event into an identity.

Wile E. Coyote, remarkably, rarely seems to make that final leap. Another ACME contraption may have failed spectacularly, but tomorrow’s plan still begins from the assumption that another attempt is possible.

Perhaps that is one of the more useful forms perseverance can take: not pretending that failure did not happen, but refusing to let one successful attempt decide what we are capable of trying next.

Persistence needs flexibility

There is a difference between giving up and recognising that the way we are pursuing something is no longer working.

Wile E. Coyote is exceptionally good at persistence. Flexibility is another matter. When one elaborate plan fails, another elaborate plan quickly takes its place. The equipment changes; the determination does not. What we rarely see is a reconsideration of the goal itself, or much evidence that yesterday’s spectacular failure has fundamentally changed today’s strategy.

Psychological research suggests that healthy persistence requires more than simply continuing. Wrosch and colleagues (2003) studied goal disengagement and goal re-engagement: our capacity to reduce efforts towards goals that have become unattainable and invest in alternative goals instead. Across three studies, greater capacity for goal adjustment was associated with with better subjective well-being. Their work challenges the appealing idea that perseverance must always mean refusing to let go. Sometimes adaptation is the more psychologically useful response.

This fits with the broader concept of psychological flexibility. Kashdan and Rottenburg (2010) describe psychological flexibility as the capacity to recognise and adapt to changing situational demands, including changing our behaviour when a strategy is no longer serving us. Flexibility does not mean abandoning something at the first sign of difficulty. It means allowing new information to influence what we do next.

Perseverance might mean trying again after receiving a rejection, practising a skill that remains difficult or continuing towards something important despite slow progress. But if every attempt is producing the same result, persistence may eventually require a different question: Do I need to try harder; or do I need to try differently?

Perhaps Wile E. Coyote’s greatest strength and greatest weakness are therefore closely related. he refuses to be defeated by failure. But his determination would become considerably more useful if it were paired with the willingness to let failure teach him something.

Resilience is not always bouncing back to exactly where we were before. Sometimes it is returning from disappointment with enough flexibility to choose a different route.

Persistence is easier when the goal matters

Not every goal deserves endless perseverance.

Part of what makes Wile E. Coyote’s so compelling is that the goal is unmistakably his. Nobody has assigned it to him. Nobody is standing beside him with a checklist demanding another attempt. However questionable his methods may be, his motivation is entirely his own.

That distinction matters psychologically. Self-determination theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, distinguishes between behaviour that feels autonomous – something we pursue because it is personally meaningful or genuinely chosen – and behaviour driven primarily by external pressure, reward or obligation. Research in this tradition has consistently linked more autonomous forms of motivation with greater persistence, engagement and psychological well-being (Deci & Ryan, 2000).

Related research on self-concordant goals suggests that people are more likely sustain efforts towards goals that reflect their own interests, values and developing sense of self. Sheldon and Elliot (1999) found that people put more sustained effort into personally self-concordant goals and experienced greater well-being when they made progress towards them.

This adds another layer to the familiar instruction to keep trying. Perseverance is not simply a personality trait that somebody either possesses or lacks. It is much easier to persist when the destination feels meaningful, when we have some ownership over how we get there and when the effort connects to something we actually value.

That may also explain why encouragement sometimes fails when it amounts to little more than “don’t give up.” Before asking somebody to keep going, it might be worth asking whether the goal still matters to them – or whether it was ever really theirs in the first place.

Wile E. Coyote certainly has no shortage of ownership over his goal. His problem is almost the opposite: he is so committed to the destination that he rarely appears to question whether the destination itself might need considering. Perhaps healthy perseverance therefore requires three things at once: a reason to continue, the flexibility to change the plan and the freedom to decide whether the goal is still worth pursuing.

Trying again without becoming your failure

There is another part of perseverance that receives less attention: how we speak to ourselves after something goes wrong.

Failure can very quickly become personal. “That didn’t work” becomes “I’m terrible at this.” A rejected application becomes evidence that we are not good enough. One mistake begins to feel like proof of something much larger about who we are.

Research on self-compassion offers an interesting counter-point to the idea that people need to be hard on themselves in order to improve. Breines and Chen (2012) conducted four experiments examining how people responded to personal weaknesses, mistakes and failure. Participants encouraged to respond to themselves with self-compassion showed greater motivation to improve in several contexts – including spending more time studying after performing poorly on a difficult test.

This is important because self-compassion is sometimes mistaken for letting ourselves off the hook. The evidence suggests that the opposite can be true. Treating ourselves with some understanding after failure does not necessarily remove thee motivation to change; it may create enough psychological space to look honestly at what happened without needing to defend ourselves from the conclusion that the failure defines us.

Wile E. Coyote might not be particularly skilled at learning from his mistakes, but he does demonstrate something surprisingly valuable: yesterday’s disaster does not become tomorrow’s identity.

He fails spectacularly. Then, he makes another plan.

There is something worth keeping in that.

Perhaps resilience is not telling ourselves that failure does not matter. It is being able to say, “that mattered, that hurt, and I still get to decide what I do next.”

Trying again becomes much easier when we do not have to prove that the previous failure never happened, only that it doesn’t get the final word.

Trying again, but differently

Wile E. Coyote is not a perfect model of resilience.If anything, he is a reminder that perseverance without reflection can become its own kind of trap. But there is still something hopeful about a character who fails so publicly, so repeatedly, and yet continues to believe that another attempt is possible.

Psychological research suggests that healthy perseverance is more complicated than simply refusing to quit. It can involve sustained effort towards meaningful goals, but also the flexibility to change direction when a strategy is not working. It can mean learning from mistakes without turning those mistakes into an identity, and sometimes it means letting go of one goal so that our energy can be invested somewhere else.

Maybe the lesson is not “never give up”; maybe it’s failure is information, not a verdict. Try again when the goal still matters. Change the plan when the evidence tells you to. Walk away when continuing no longer serves you; and when something goes wrong, resist the temptation to turn one failed attempt into a definition of who you are.

Wile E. Coyote will almost certainly be back tomorrow with another elaborate plan. The rest of us might benefit from keeping his willingness to try again, while becoming slightly better at asking what yesterday’s failure was trying to teach us.

Next month in Through The Character

On October 1st, Through the Character turns to Wreck-It Ralph and asks what can happen when a role becomes an identity;

What Wreck-It Ralph Knows About Being Told Who You Are

A look at labels, expectations, self-concept and the psychology of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

References & Further Reading

Breines, J. G., & Chen, S. (2012). Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(9), 1133–1143.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.

Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(6), 1087–1101.

Kashdan, T. B., & Rottenberg, J. (2010). Psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(7), 865–878.

Moser, J. S., Schroder, H. S., Heeter, C., Moran, T. P., & Lee, Y.-H. (2011). Mind your errors: Evidence for a neural mechanism linking growth mind-set to adaptive posterror adjustments. Psychological Science, 22(12), 1484–1489.

Sheldon, K. M., & Elliot, A. J. (1999). Goal striving, need satisfaction, and longitudinal well-being: The self-concordance model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3), 482–497.

Wrosch, C., Scheier, M. F., Carver, C. S., & Schulz, R. (2003). The importance of goal disengagement in adaptive self-regulation: When giving up is beneficial. Self and Identity, 2(1), 1–20.