Even rewarding excellence with honor rolls and status may be detrimental if students restrict their interests or avoid hard courses to keep their GPA high. There are no simple rules that all wise people know. Accumulating a lot of money is critical for some and rather meaningless for others. Likewise, failure affects us differently. If you are success-oriented, a failure experience seems to increase your drive to succeed and you will try again to accomplish the task.
Losers visualize the penalties of failure.
Winners visualize the rewards of success. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. This is easy for the success-oriented, hard for the person trying to avoid failing. Also, while it seems logical, experimentalists didn't point out until recently that the effects of a reinforcer depends on the context, i.e. a reward has much more impact on behavior if it is powerful relative to the other rewards available in the environment. Thus, the payoff for argumentative-rebellious behavior could be reduced by increasing the rewards obtained from completely different behaviors, such as studying, doing the dishes, getting a job, etc.