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That Duke Professor who interrupts your doomscroll with lessons you never asked for.
"I've spent 20 years watching brilliant students sabotage their futures because they were scared to be wrong. So I stopped designing classes that chase success and started designing ones that make failure survivable (and maybe even a little bit fun)."
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"4/5. Kinda cringe at times, but it ended up being legitimately useful for interviews, so I can't complain too much."
Anonymous student evaluation
Simon & Schuster · Preorder now
Learning to Fail
The Unexpected Upside of Taking Real Risks
Aaron Dinin
In Learning to Fail, Dr. Dinin shows how the rules we learn about failure shape our choices, and how much becomes possible when we stop letting them.
Hardcover · Launches March 2, 2027
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The book is 278 pages. The newsletter is… shorter.
Both are full of strategies for unlearning all the terrible lessons school taught you about failure.
What We Know About Learning to Fail & Resilience
Dr. Dinin and clinical psychologist Dr. Becky Kennedy, founder of Good Inside, on how failure and resilience shape the next generation of college students. Recorded live at Duke University.
Speaking
Bring Learning to Fail to your campus or event
A keynote or workshop that rewrites the rules your audience learned about failure.
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Teach a Learning to Fail challenge
It started in a Duke classroom, showed up on your social media feed, and now you can teach Dr. Dinin's Learning to Fail challenges in your own classrooms or communities.
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