Failure Harms Performance
We all know how a rejection or failure can bruise the ego, leading to demoralization and diminished motivation. But failure can also have an impact on our lives that we are not aware of.
In one experiment, people were asked to perform an intelligence test. Half of the group was given an unsolvable test.
When all of them were given a very basic test afterward, an alarming number of those who had "failed" before were not able to solve the very easy questions they were asked. They overestimated the difficulty of the task and underestimated their knowledge. It was not accessible to them, and they could not make any use of it. This is something unconscious.
Failure can distort people's perception of their goals and also their perception of very fundamental basic abilities.