Failing Better: Having the Courage to Make the Most of the F-Word
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Zaktualizowano: 7 maj
“Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.”
Sir Richard Branson, Entrepreneur of everything
"Courage" is a word I find myself returning to frequently in my work: the courage to be vulnerable, the courage to tell it how it is and the courage to push myself out of my comfort zone. But the other day, I came across an unfamiliar expression about courage: "Have the courage to suck at something new." It brought to mind the qualities we need to cultivate to overcome the fear of failure. In many cases, having the courage to fail is the foundation of success.
I like to see failure as an interesting window offering a perspective on a process I want to master. An inner voice says: "I know it is going to work out; I'm just curious to know how." I accept that the pathway to success will take a few failures along the way, and I can enjoy them as a stimulus to understanding—a time when I learn the most.
Like many aspects of work, once we drain the endeavor of emotional anxiety and personal judgment, we can turn almost any outcome to our advantage. But there are good and bad ways to learn from failure.
Failure is part of the journey
In business, as in other public arenas like politics and sports, performance is all; investors and analysts intensely scrutinize results, and we can't hide mistakes and reversals. Failure to perform is often reported in the news with a tone of shame, humiliation and disapproval. Failures let down the fans, the investors and the people, and those who fail publicly are often marked by it for the rest of their careers.
But away from the headlines, failures sit alongside successes, and both are iterative and gradual and often intertwined. Inventors, scientists and other innovators use a trial-and-error approach in the development of their work because they are working in an entirely new frontier; there is no map to success. In uncharted territory, only those with supernatural powers would proceed to success without some wrong turns and dead ends. The prolific American inventor Thomas Edison famously remarked, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” By shifting the perspective from definitive failure to iterative learning, great innovators foster a mindset that does not fear mistakes but instead sees them as the raw material of eventual progress.
A new framework for handling failure
Albert Einstein is believed to have once said, "One cannot alter a condition with the same mindset that created it in the first place." This notion applies well to business failure, something we are taught to dread and avoid. A truly productive approach to failure, one that business leaders and innovators can benefit most from, requires the courage to look at the fundamentals, the original paradigm, and to recognize a business failure as a "failure of ideas"—in other words, a failure of the original concept rather than poor execution.
In my experience, you can only reframe failure productively through a lens of reflection, perspective-shifting and learning. Recognizing these moments not as final judgments on capability or value but as opportunities to confront foundational truths is critical. This confrontation is where growth occurs.
How to reflect on your own personal and business failures
Embrace reflection by critically examining the root causes of setbacks, focusing on what you can learn rather than assigning blame.
Shift your perspective by reframing failures as opportunities for growth, recognizing that they often reveal deeper truths about your goals, strategies or assumptions.
Cultivate a mindset of curiosity and resilience, viewing each challenge as a stepping stone to greater insight and future success.
In business, the courage to confront failure with a growth mindset—and, more importantly, to confront the thinking that caused it—is a hallmark of good leadership. By seeing failure as an indicator of progress rather than a symptom of weakness, leaders achieve resilience and empower their teams to approach challenges with curiosity and purpose. But I would go further: The truly successful befriend their failures in the way that inventors and scientists do. For those of us who have been taught to fear failure, that takes courage, but it is the kind that turns it into success.
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