Behind every great success story lie even greater tales of failure. Steven Spielberg was rejected from film school three times. Oprah Winfrey was fired from her first anchor job. There’s a good reason this has become something of a valuable cliché.

Setbacks can be a crucial part of young professionals’ development, according to research from Kellogg’s Ben Jones and Dashun Wang. More on that this week.

Plus, if, like me, you’re readying yourself for spring cleaning, consider a few words of advice about your work wardrobe from Kellogg’s Ellen Taaffe.

The science of failure and success

Failure has become something of an essential ingredient for professional development. A Google News search of just the last week brings up hundreds of articles discussing some form of professional failure: lessons learned from the failed SpaceX launch at NPR, for example, or how to handle rejection in goal setting at Vox.

What’s the appeal? Taking steps to learn from failure can pay dividends in the long run.

Just last week, Forbes discussed five ways setbacks can fuel career success, highlighting Jones and Wang’s 2019 study of grant applications. Jones and Wang examined a dataset of 778,291 R01 NIH grants between 1990 and 2005—NIH’s oldest and most common grant type and hugely important to early career researchers in the biomedical sciences. Then the team determined which grants fell just short of receiving funding (“near miss” grants) and which managed to squeak past the cutoff point (“narrow wins”). And to figure out just how much of a difference these early successes or setbacks made to a scientific career, the researchers traced the careers of 623 near-miss and 561 narrow-win scientists.

They found that scientists in the near-miss group were more likely to have “hit” papers (that is, papers that cracked the top-five percent of citations in a particular field and year). The team’s analysis also suggests that the act itself of failing may have pushed the frustrated scientists to improve.

“The advice to persevere is common,” says Jones in Kellogg Insight. “But the idea that you take something valuable from the loss—and are better for it—is surprising and inspiring.”

Read more about the research in Kellogg Insight. (Plus enjoy additional research and insights on the upsides of failure here.)

What to wear—and what it says about you

The decision on how to dress is one of many that we make every day, despite it seeming to have nothing to do with our jobs. It’s a decision about how we want to be seen, or not seen, by our bosses and coworkers and clients. On a recently re-released The Insightful Leader podcast, Kellogg’s Ellen Taaffe reflects on those dilemmas. She thinks a lot about the question of how we present ourselves.

Before Kellogg, she was a brand-management executive at PepsiCo, Whirlpool, and Royal Caribbean. While on one sales team, her boss asked her not to wear red. She didn’t want to wear black or navy—it didn’t suit her. So finally, she decided to go her own way.

“I think it definitely was a time when I was gathering my courage. To, a little bit, go against what my boss had said,” says Taaffe. “But I can remember one particular meeting when I did lay out my clothes the night before. It was just this feeling of, I don’t know what his reaction is, but this is who I am.”

It can take courage to let your identity show at work. And sometimes, it might be smart to reign it in a little—at least for a while.

For more on how you should present yourself at work, listen to Taaffe and Kellogg’s Derek Rucker on The Insightful Leader podcast.