Rober's second piece of advice is to frame your failures like a video game. He ran an experiment where 50,000 YouTube followers played a coding puzzle — half were penalized with lost points for failing, and half were not. Those who weren't penalized attempted the puzzle 2.5x more and succeeded 16% more often. He uses Super Mario Bros as an analogy: no one falls in a pit and thinks "I'm so ashamed, I'm never doing this again." They think "Okay, there's a pit there, next time I'll come at it with more speed." He argues that if Mario had no obstacles, no one would play — your MIT degree means so much precisely because of the struggle.