Are You Learning From Your Mistakes? Good news! Failure is only tragic if you don’t learn anything from it. The Colonel said, “We don’t learn much when everything goes right. We learn most when things go wrong.”
History is rife with stories of people who have “failed forward to success,” as I would say. The Wright brothers failed initially, as did Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Walt Disney, Abraham Lincoln, Michael Jordan, Franklin D. Roosevelt—the list could go on and on. The key to each of these ultimate success stories is that they all learned valuable lessons from their initial failures and put those lessons into practice to reach their eventual success.
During his lifetime, whenever I called The Colonel to admit to failure, and talk it out, his initial question was always the same, “So, what have you learned, kid?” He never asked what I’d done wrong, but he always asked what I had learned. “Failure is only tragic,” he said, “if you don’t learn anything from it. If there is growth that comes from it, then we can live with it and move on.”
Failure is a vital part of the growth process. Without it, any solution could be counted as a triumph, when there might have been a better, more successful alternative if you had simply failed a few times along the way.
Read Lauren’s Whitepaper on The Nine Essentials of Significant Leadership.
Whether it is in sports, industry, science or art, the true giants in their field know that things go right more consistently if we learn from the times when things go wrong.
