Optimists, by contrast, look for specific, limited, short-term explanations for bad events, and as a result, in the face of a setback, they’re more likely to pick themselves up and try again.

If we don't give kids the opportunity to fail when they're growing up, and to fail productively, to fail creatively, that they're going to get out there into the world and they're going to hit some kind of setback, like everybody does, and they're going to get completely derailed.

And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.

If kids've been overprotected from failure in childhood, they get out into the world and they really get thrown off.