Learning from Failure
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Failure can hurt and there is no point in hiding away from that fact. Picking yourself up and starting again is one of the biggest things you can ever ask of yourself. At that point, being told that it is an opportunity to learn and to grow, is rarely helpful. The endless and upbeat quotes of the wise extolling its merits can leave you feeling worse. The annoying fact is that the wise are right. The lessons you learn by getting things wrong are the hardest to obtain, but are the most valuable. So how can you make sure you get every ounce of learning possible?
Wise words from people who have faced failure: “Our best successes often come after our greatest disappointments” Henry Ward Beecher. “A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.” BF Skinner. “Don’t be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.” Richard Branson.
- Take responsibility for what went wrong – it is very tempting to make excuses or to blame other people for your failure. It may well be true that it is not your fault, but that won’t help you learn. What could you have done differently? Could you have made changes earlier? Were there areas that you didn’t put much time into, that with hindsight were key to success? How could you deal more effectively with stakeholders who were hard to contact? Why did you miss that the budget was not enough to get it delivered? Don’t protect yourself and your own feelings to try to make yourself feel better. Face the truth head on. Successful people have a track record of success. They don’t have a track record of failures that weren’t their fault.
- Ask the people who failed alongside you to help – getting together with people who failed with you is often the last thing that you want to do, but an honest review of where improvements could have happened is cathartic and often insightful. It is a great opportunity to see where problems and challenges could have been spotted earlier and addressed.
- Learn from the people who know you – people who know you can often see things that you don’t. Ask the people you know if they can see what you could have improved upon that would have made a difference.
- Remember that you did your best – when you are bashing yourself for failing, remember that it wasn’t something that you deliberately set out to do. You set out to do a good job. If you feel that you didn’t do your best or that there was more you could have done, then learn the lesson from it. Failure wasn’t your intention.
- Make sure you take the time to learn – the general pace of work means that you may be tempted just to move onto the next thing without taking the time to learn. Don’t fall into that trap. Push yourself to undertake a review.
- Acknowledge your achievement, when you have learned – failure isn’t failure if you have learned from it. The next time you face the same challenge and you succeed, realise that you have learnt, developed and become more capable. You have a track record of success! Also, make sure you capture the details – it’s great to talk about how you turned failure into success in a future interview!
Wise words from people who have faced failure: “Our best successes often come after our greatest disappointments” Henry Ward Beecher. “A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.” BF Skinner. “Don’t be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.” Richard Branson.