Professional Development
Failures card, MethodKit for Professional Development
Card 18 of 66 · MethodKit for Professional Development
  • ThemeSkills & Growth
  • CardCard 18 of 66
  • Questions5 to explore
Skills & Growth

Failures

Errors & what you learn from them

Failure is one of the most efficient teachers you will encounter, but only if you actually sit with it long enough to learn something.

Every professional has a history of things that went wrong: projects that did not land, roles that were not a fit, bets that did not pay off, conversations that damaged something important. Most people move past these as quickly as possible, which is understandable but also means leaving a lot of learning on the table.

The useful question after a failure is not only what went wrong but what you were assuming that turned out to be false. Those assumptions are the real material. They reveal how you were thinking, what you were optimizing for, and what you did not know you did not know. Getting specific about that is more useful than a general sense that something went badly.

There is also a difference between failures that were genuinely yours and ones that resulted from circumstances outside your control. Both are worth understanding, but they call for different responses. Internalizing failures that were not really yours is as unhelpful as refusing to take responsibility for the ones that were.

How to work on it

Practical ways to reflect on and develop this dimension of your working life. How it tends to look at different stages of a career, and where to put your attention.

Early career

Treat this as a good time to fail relatively cheaply. Take risks you can afford to take and reflect carefully when they do not work out.

Mid career

Look back at your failures with more distance and try to see the patterns: what kinds of situations do you tend to misjudge, and where do you repeatedly underestimate risk?

Late career

Use your experience of failure to help others avoid the same mistakes, and stay honest with yourself about the failures you are still not fully comfortable looking at.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

  1. What is the professional failure you have learned the most from, and what exactly did it teach you?

  2. Are there failures in your past that you have never fully reckoned with, and what might be worth revisiting?

  3. What assumptions were you making when something went wrong that you now know were flawed?

  4. How do you typically respond to your own failures: do you move past them quickly, dwell on them too long, or something else?

  5. What would you do differently if you could go back to a specific moment of failure, and are you applying that insight now?

Things to notice

  • Treating every failure as a character flaw rather than a source of information: the goal is learning, not self-punishment.
  • Rushing past failures before you have extracted what they have to teach: the discomfort of sitting with what went wrong is often where the learning actually happens.
  • Over-learning from individual failures and drawing conclusions that are too broad: one bad experience in a particular type of role or organization does not mean all such roles or organizations are wrong for you.