We don’t want to talk about it. While LinkedIn and press articles are chock-full of aspirational success stories, privately we're burdened with faults and negativity bias.
Once you make a mistake, you face a choice: Get upset and blame others, or make amends and learn something new.
The choice to own your failure is not easy. The benefits to accepting failure, however, are many:
Humility – The heroic narratives of startups can be deceiving. Mistakes ground us in reality and improve future decisions.
Growth – Recognizing and acknowledging your failure will make you stronger and more trusted in the long term.
Responsibility – Admitting accountability leads to teamwork and best practices required to succeed together.
Innovation – Inventing a better approach takes many unsuccessful experiments.
When a reporter asked, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?" Thomas Edison replied, "I didn't fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps."
Resilience – Recovering leads to the perseverance and the tolerance required for peak growth.
"Great success is built on failure, frustration, even catastrophe." - Sumner Redstone
After failure, reframing is critical. Instead of dwelling on poor results, focus on how you can impact the next outcome.
We learn a ton from failure. Many times, it builds the disposition for eventual success. While failure may seem fatal, you stand to gain a lot.
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Photo by Ian Kim who can be found here: https://bit.ly/3evRNRd