How to Turn Past Failures Into Lessons: I Ching Hexagram 42 Increase Says "益之用凶事，无咎 (Benefit Used in Adversity Brings No Blame)"

There was a student who took the postgraduate entrance exam for three years straight.

When it comes to study scenarios, the Hexagram of Increase (Yi) explains this situation best.

On the day his third-year results came out, he sent me a message of just three words: "I can’t do it."

I asked him how he had failed the first two times.

He said he didn’t get in the first year, fell short by ten points the second year, and missed the mark by more than ten points again the third year.

I asked where he had fallen short the first year.

He thought for a long time and said he didn’t know—maybe he just hadn’t studied well enough.

I told him that was exactly why he’d been taking the exam for three years.

In study scenarios, this is exactly what the third line (Six in the Third Place) of the Hexagram of Increase talks about.

Wind and Thunder Increase (風雷益): Where to Add the Gain

The Hexagram of Increase has Xun (The Gentle, Wind) as the upper trigram and Zhen (The Arousing, Thunder) as the lower trigram. Wind is above, thunder is below.

Wind and thunder stir each other, mutually increasing one another’s power.

The Xiang Commentary (Great Images) says: "The superior person, seeing what is good, moves toward it; having faults, corrects them."

This line has two parts. "Seeing what is good, moves toward it" means learning from what is right. "Having faults, corrects them" means fixing one’s mistakes.

Most people only do the first half.

Buying courses, reading books, signing up for classes, doing practice questions—all of these are "seeing what is good, moving toward it."

Few people do the second half: correcting their faults.

Because correcting mistakes requires first admitting you were wrong. Admitting you were wrong requires first seeing the mistake clearly. Seeing the mistake clearly is ten times harder than making it.

Six in the Third Place: 益之用凶事，无咎 (Increase Used for Inauspicious Matters, No Blame)

The line text for the Six in the Third Place of the Hexagram of Increase reads: 益之用凶事，无咎。有孚中行，告公用圭。

"Used for inauspicious matters" means taking bad things and putting them to use.

Inauspicious matters are failures, losses, humiliating experiences.

"No blame" means there will be no major problems.

This line is the most counterintuitive one in the entire Hexagram of Increase.

It doesn’t say "avoid inauspicious matters." It says "use inauspicious matters."

Bad things aren’t something to run from—they’re something to use.

The Xiang Commentary adds: "Increase used for inauspicious matters is something inherently present."

"Inherently present" means these things are always there. Since you can’t outrun them, you might as well use them.

This is the most crucial turning point of the Hexagram of Increase when applied to study scenarios.

Failure isn’t the tuition. Reviewing and learning from failure is the tuition.

Failure without reflection is just failure.

有孚中行: Be Sincere First, Then Stay Centered

The line text then gives two conditions.

"有孚 (Sincerity and Trust)" means being honest. "中行 (Walking the middle path)" means acting properly, without leaning to extremes.

These two conditions are the prerequisite for "using inauspicious matters."

In study scenarios, "有孚" means not lying to yourself.

Not lying to yourself is harder than you might think.

I’ve seen so many post-failure reviews that are just people making excuses for themselves.

"The questions were too obscure." "The teacher didn’t explain well." "I was feeling under the weather back then." "I underperformed on exam day."

These reasons might all be true. But they all share one thing in common: none of them are within your control to change.

If your review concludes with something "out of your control," the whole exercise is useless.

"中行" means not going to extremes.

After a failure, people tend to swing to two extremes.

One is total self-denial: "I’m just no good at this. I’m not cut out for it."

The other is total externalization: "It’s all someone else’s fault."

Neither extreme leads to growth. Walking the middle path means asking: which steps did I get wrong, and which steps did I get right?

告公用圭: Speak Your Failure Out Loud

The last four characters of the line text are the easiest to overlook: 告公用圭.

A "圭 (gui)" was a ceremonial jade token in ancient times. Bringing a gui to see the ruler meant making a formal report.

"告公用圭" means formally speaking the matter out loud.

Not just complaining over drinks with friends. A formal, targeted, clear account of the failure.

Why is this step important?

Because once you say it out loud, you can’t lie to yourself anymore.

I once had people do an exercise: find someone, and tell them the full story of your failure for twenty minutes straight, no vague language allowed.

Most people start fudging by the third minute.

"Roughly," "maybe," "things were a bit chaotic back then."

As soon as you start fudging, you know exactly which part you haven’t thought through.

Tell it once, then tell it again. The second time is much clearer. By the third time, you’ll notice you’ve been avoiding a certain part the whole time.

That part is where your tuition goes.

A Concrete Review Method

I’ve taught people a simple four-column method.

First column: Facts.

Only write what happened, no judgments.

What score did you get? Which subject was your weakest? Which questions did you get wrong? How many hours did you study each day?

The facts column should be detailed enough that you find it boring.

Second column: Judgments.

What was I thinking at the time?

"I thought this chapter wouldn’t be tested." "I thought I still had time." "I thought I understood it."

Third column: Verification.

Were those judgments proven right or wrong later?

This column is the hardest, because most of our judgments turn out to be wrong.

Fourth column: Fixes.

Next time I run into the same situation, what specific action will I change?

Note: it’s an action, not an attitude.

"Try harder next time" is not a fix. "Do a full chapter dictation every Sunday" is a fix.

Fill out all four columns, and it fits on one page.

A one-page review is more useful than three months of self-blame.

After the Review, How to Apply It to the Next Round

The most common way reviews go to waste is when you write them and then set them aside.

The Hexagram of Increase talks about "increase"—increase means you have to add it on.

"Adding it on" means: the results of this round must be visible in the actions of the next round.

So the final step of a review is turning those four columns into three things.

First: change one action.

Not change your mindset—change an action.

For example: do a full chapter dictation every Sunday night. Or: copy down every wrong answer after finishing a practice set.

Stick to one action for three months, and you’ll see the difference.

Second: cut one thing out.

This is the most counterintuitive tip.

Most people add things after a review—more courses, more practice questions, more study time.

But the Hexagram of Work on the Decayed (Gu) talks about accumulated flaws, and the Hexagram of Increase talks about gain—both point to the same truth: you can’t add anything new if you don’t empty out first.

Cutting out one low-efficiency task works better than adding three high-efficiency ones.

I knew someone who failed the exam twice. The third year, he did one thing: he cut his daily two-hour practice session down to forty minutes, and spent all the remaining time organizing his wrong answers.

He passed the third year.

He said he used to be just accumulating volume, but what he lacked was qualitative organization.

Third: find someone to check in with.

Not a teacher—someone who’s working on the same thing as you.

Check in with each other every two weeks, and ask one question: "Did you follow through on that fix you talked about last time?"

That one question works better than any self-discipline trick.

Why So Many People Skip Reviews

Three reasons.

First: it hurts.

Taking a failure apart and looking at it honestly really hurts. A lot of people would rather take the exam another year than sit down and dissect what went wrong.

Second: they’re busy.

They jump straight into the next round of prep, using busyness to cover up the gaps from the last attempt.

Third: they don’t believe in it.

They think reviews are useless, that success comes down to luck.

Of these three reasons, the third is the most troublesome.

Because once you think success is all luck, you stop trying to improve. And if you don’t improve, you just have to wait for luck to strike next time.

The Hexagram of Increase’s line "increase used for inauspicious matters" is something only people who don’t believe in luck can truly understand.

What Happened Later

The student who took the exam for three years never tried a fourth time.

He did one thing: he spread all three years’ score reports, three sets of past exam papers, and three years’ worth of calendars out on his desk, and did a full four-column review.

After finishing, he said one thing to me: "All three years, I’ve been patching the same weak spot."

He said his specialized course score was bad the first year, so he focused on that the second year—only for his English score to drop. The third year he focused on English, and his specialized course score fell again.

Three years, just going in circles.

He later got a job at a company, working in the exact field he’d spent three years trying to improve in.

Last year he told me those three years weren’t wasted.

I said it wasn’t that the three years weren’t wasted—it was that he finally sat down and looked back at them properly.

At the end of the day, the Hexagram of Increase has one core message for study scenarios.

Bad things don’t generate gain on their own.

They only generate gain when you take them apart, speak them clearly, and write them down.

Tripping and falling isn’t embarrassing. What’s embarrassing is tripping and never looking back to see why.