Leadership success comes from failure

Sometimes many, many failures.

All this excellence-seeking will lead you square into the path of something that most of us will go to great lengths to avoid: failure. We’ll blame others, blame our circumstances, and blame the weather to avoid responsibility for failure. Most usually and tragically we avoid failure by avoiding those things at which we aren’t sure we can succeed.

Here’s the truth: if you aren’t failing at least occasionally, you aren’t doing anything of long-term value for yourself or others.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I absolutely want to avoid failure in everything I do. I work for success and I expect excellence in others and in myself. So why do I fail? Why will you—and I mean will, not might—fail?

We are most vulnerable to failure when we are trying something new, in other words, when we are learning. The bigger the lesson, the higher the potential benefit, and the more dramatic the failure is likely to be. An Olympic hopeful learning a new vault is going to have some spectacular failures, and probably more than a few injuries as a result. But when she finally reaches the goal, in this case a new skill, her chances for gold are increased dramatically.

Likewise as you progress through your academic and into your professional careers, and even in your personal lives, you will be learning big lessons. Sometimes you’ll be successful the first time out. You will feel pretty good about this, but you will have learned only a little that you will be able to apply elsewhere. This is because you completed something that you were already equipped to do.

There’s nothing wrong with this. In fact, it can provide a healthy reminder that there are things you can do right if you’ve just had a series of failures. When I was learning to (snow) ski advanced slopes, and spending a lot of time on my face in the snow, it was heartening to do a few runs down beginner slopes and feel like the master of the mountain.

Think about your failures. A class you had to repeat. A power supply you never could get built correctly. A bacterial culture you couldn’t quite grow.

Now think about your successes. In most cases I’ll bet you cannot remember a meaningful success—something that you can still bask in the glow of—without remembering the failures that preceded it. Undoubtedly you were successful on any number of things the first time out, but you don’t remember them because they didn’t change you. Your head may have learned some new thing, but your heart didn’t, and the lesson got pushed away in the tumult of new experiences and lessons. Big failures mean you are learning big lessons: stick with it.

That said, let’s remember that failure is still unpleasant, usually for everyone involved, and in some cases is pretty costly. After any one failure you cannot guarantee, to yourself or to others, that you will make your goal on the next attempt. But what you can, and should, expect is not to repeat the same failure twice. As you are failing in new ways you are still learning. When you start to repeat past failures—failing at the same place in the same way—you’ve stopped learning and you need to step back and figure out why.

The difference between a victim and a victor is that the victor recognizes failure as a lesson that brings him one step closer to success. A victim, on the other hand, feels stung and embarrassed and steps back from the lesson to choose an easier path. The victim blames others for the failure without looking for the cause in himself or herself. As a result of these destructive behaviors the victim never gets anywhere while the victor, (ironically) usually with many more failures than the victim, will eventually rise to success.

Recognize failure as the currency of success, not as an occasion for recrimination and remorse.