I encountered this quote on a T-shirt last month and it struck me as relevant to us and our work, perhaps now more than ever. Often attributed to Nelson Mandela, “I never lose. I either win or learn,” captures something essential about how the most effective people, and the most resilient institutions, move through the world. In health professions and scientific education, we should take this statement seriously – not as a motivational slogan (although it works for that too), but as a genuine philosophy of practice.
The Moment We’re In
We are in a period of significant and rapid change – in how we train health professionals, how we conduct science, how we deliver care, and how we think about the purpose of all three. Education is being redesigned. Accreditation standards are evolving. Artificial intelligence is reshaping clinical workflows and research methodology. And this month, we welcome a new dean, a transition that brings fresh energy and a new chapter for our institution.
Change at this pace is uncomfortable. It asks us to operate with incomplete information, to make decisions before the evidence is fully in, and, sometimes, to fall short. In this environment, how we think about failure, setback, and uncertainty matters enormously.
This is why growth mindset, the concept embodied in this quote, is not just a concept for students and trainees. It is a continuous professional commitment for all of us.
To Our Students and Trainees
You entered training knowing it would be hard. But you may not have been told clearly enough that getting things wrong is part of how learning works – not a detour around it.
In clinical training and in research, the stakes feel high because they often are. A misread ECG, a missed diagnosis, a hypothesis that doesn’t hold up, a presentation that doesn’t land, can feel like failures. The emotional weight of these experiences is real and worth acknowledging. The culture of healthcare and science has not always made space for that.
But consider what Mandela’s framing actually asks of you: not to be indifferent to difficulty, but to refuse to let difficulty be the final word. Every case that humbled you is a case you will remember differently in five years. Every experiment that failed taught you something about the question you were asking. Every feedback conversation that stung was a moment that your mentor invested in you.
A growth mindset does not mean minimizing mistakes or bypassing accountability. It means treating what goes wrong as information rather than verdict. It means asking what do I do differently? more readily than asking what does this say about me?
You are training during a period when the field itself is still figuring things out — when best practices in AI-assisted diagnosis, equitable care delivery, and research reproducibility are being actively shaped. Your generation will not inherit a fixed body of knowledge or way of doing things. You will help build it. That requires exactly the disposition Mandela described: staying in the game, continuing to learn, refusing to let any single outcome define the arc.
To Our Faculty and Staff
The growth-mindset conversation in health professions and scientific education has often been directed at learners. That framing is incomplete, and sometimes unfair.
Students learn how to relate to failure primarily by watching us. When we model intellectual humility – when we say I got that wrong or I’m not sure, let me find out or we tried that approach and it didn’t work, here’s what we learned, we give others permission to do the same. When we do it as leaders and supervisors, we create a culture.
As educators, program directors, researchers, and staff, we are navigating institutional change alongside our learners. Not every initiative will succeed on the first attempt. Not every innovation will land the way we hoped. What matters is whether we build the habit of honest reflection into our work – whether we ask, as individuals, teams and as an institution, what this experience is teaching us, and what we want to do with that knowledge.
Growth mindset at the institutional level looks like this: after a curricular, course, or pedagogical revision that didn’t achieve its goals, we study what happened, revise and try something new, rather than quietly moving on. After a grant that wasn’t funded, we read the reviews carefully and decide whether we can revise and resubmit or need to rethink our plans. After a learner or team member struggles, we ask what the environment contributed, not only what the person lacked. We build feedback loops. We protect psychological safety. We distinguish between errors that demand accountability and imperfections that are the normal coarseness of innovation.
What This Community Embodies
Across health professions and the full spectrum of basic, translational, clinical, and population health research, this community brings together people who have chosen fields built on uncertainty. Science advances through failed hypotheses. Clinical judgment develops through cases that challenge you.
You already know how to lose well. I hope this newsletter reminds you that it’s one of the most important things you do.
The education you receive and make possible is designed to produce not just knowledgeable practitioners of healthcare and science, but resilient, reflective ones – people who will keep learning long after formal training ends. That capacity is what this community is and must continue to be committed to cultivating. We won’t always get it right. But we will always be learning. And in that, we will always win.