New Year’s resolution gloss wears off in late January, revealing that I have yet again been fooled into believing in calendrical transformation. Disillusioned with my future self’s disappointing discipline, I wonder what I could have done differently, eventually abandoning hope and resolving to try again in the easier future.
Could I continue on this glide path or learn a framework to break this cycle of misery? Even though Failure gets a bad rap, every setback, mistake, or grand mess-up can be turned into growth. Here’s how.
Embracing the flop
At the first parent-teacher meeting for our eldest child, I heard the phrase, “Mistakes grow your brain.” It has stuck with me, and I use it often. It’s an elegant and straightforward way to explain a topic essential to successfully navigating life.
To say that we can’t learn from success is, of course, a fallacy. However, many factors contribute to success, and it’s hard to isolate the reasons that led to it.
That’s not the case with failure. Failure teaches better than success because it draws a clear line between action and outcome.
Mistakes aren’t necessarily the most efficient teacher, as anyone who’s tried to climb Everest without a trained sherpa can attest. They’re the most expensive way to learn, ironically making them the most effective via the pain pathway.
In an ideal world, the successful learn vicariously; the foolish insist on firsthand pain.
If we could learn from the mistakes of others, there would be no need for self-help literature. A quote by André Gide, a French author, goes along those lines: “Everything to be said has already been said. But since nobody was listening, it has to be said all over again.”
As human beings, we are meant to grow and change. We thrive on forward momentum. Success loops discourage change, but failure encourages it.
Failure is inevitable. Even if we do nothing, we still fail – to live up to our potential. Yet somehow, we fight this inevitability and make ourselves unnecessarily miserable, as if hot-stepping on garden rakes is not the most human of pastimes. Pain is an excellent teacher.
According to Nir Eyal, a leading behavioural scientist and a good friend, fear of judgement and self-doubt are the two reasons why we feel the way we think about failure, masking the fact that resilience is a learnable skill that transforms setbacks into opportunities for progress. He has put it elegantly into the following formula:
Failure + resilience = success.
To cultivate resilience, we must reframe failure and learn to extract the lessons without suffering the drama.
Stepping Stones or Water Lilies? The taxonomy of a failure
Failures and mistakes cover the entire grey spectrum, but our emotions tend to move between extremes, amplifying each failure and making it seem more dramatic than it is. So when we’re in the moment, it is hard to tell whether it’s a whoopsie or a life-altering turn of events.
A great way to assess the magnitude of a failure is to zoom out and ask: will this matter in a year or three years? This perspective often reveals that failure is not only a critical one (A one-way door that we cannot come back through) but also a two-way door, a reversible and learnable failure.
Unfortunately, the only way to tell if something that looks like a stepping stone is a water lily that cannot support our weight is to step on it. The key skill to master is learning to recognise and use the stepping stones. While it’s hard now, it will become much easier with some reflection.
Before proceeding, we must address a significant perceptional distortion that is the main obstacle to cultivating resilience to failure. While acknowledging failure’s role in growth is key, our perception of failure often distorts reality, leading us to overestimate its impact.
Dim the spotlight.
We have not evolved to distinguish between an inconsequential whoopsie and a catastrophic failure. Most mistakes trigger the same biochemical reactions as danger or fight or flight. This means that when experiencing failure, we are likely to be highly irrational.
In the past, that made sense, as mistakes were often life-threatening. Today, the panic response has evolved to trigger feelings of shame and humiliation, eliciting fear of being thrown out of the tribe. This is where the spotlight effect comes in.
The spotlight effect describes the phenomenon of imagining that people think of us far more often than they do. The truth is, of course, that people are too busy with their own lives to dwell on their mistakes.
The spotlight distortion means that we treat the perceived public image of messing up like a scandalous secret better left unspoken when it’s more like free tuition in the University of Life.
So, the next time you mess up in public, remember the 80/20 rule of public failure: 80 per cent of the people don’t care, and the other 20 are happy that it’s not just them. In this context, the reaction of others to your failures generally says more about their internal struggles than your shortcomings.
Understanding this frees you to step away from their scoreboards and focus on your own game. Often, the unexpected gift hidden in a failure is a new direction you’d never have considered if everything had gone smoothly.
Data, Not Drama: Reframing Failure as Feedback
Having understood the spotlight effect, the next step we must take is to treat failure like data, not drama. Every misstep is just another clue in your ongoing investigation of what works and what doesn’t, but separating noise from signal is very hard when emotions are running high.
The framework to adopt is to say: I don’t want to repeat the same life lesson multiple times. What is the one thing that I can take away from this as a datapoint – a decision that did not work, an incorrect assumption, or a bias that went unchecked?
This is more constructive than concluding “I’m no good”. Distinguishing repeated mistakes from new ones is what turns failure into growth.
An advanced approach would be to ask for feedback, introduce objective metrics, or try to find a pattern, which would widen the ways to learn from what is being examined. A good place to start is to look for the top three cognitive biases: confirmation bias, anchoring bias, and the availability heuristic.
Fighting anchoring bias when managing large securities portfolios was very difficult for me. When you have to make many decisions quickly, you naturally overweigh recent information, which can be highly problematic. Forcing perspective and delaying decisions turned many water lilies into stepping stones for me.
Finally, we must constantly remind ourselves that setbacks aren’t personality verdicts. They’re just feedback, telling us, “That path doesn’t lead where you hoped—try another.” Sure, it bruises the ego, but it’s infinitely better than the unending ache of regret.
Forging Your “Failing Forward” Process
So, we have learned to recognise one-way doors, tune down the inner voice of shame, and extract data from drama. But that’s the analytical part. To leverage what you have learned from your failures, you need a repeatable process that builds resilience as a core skill.
Whether you give yourself a hard time or not after failing is a personal trait, I have not been able to nurture self-compassion and positivity, but you can.
What I find a lot more powerful is sharing my failures openly. I offer them as “Here’s how I messed up. Go find a new garden rake to step on,” which not only evokes empathy but somehow de-powers the weight of the mistake, as it can be reframed as a pay-it-forward sacrifice.
Specifically, adding reps to the process through a “failure diary” (look to the “Library of Mistakes” in Edinburgh for inspiration), video sharing or blogging can be extremely helpful. Not everyone will have the discipline and self-compassion to do this, but it’s worth trying. This will forge a sense of curiosity over regret, making it easier to recover after a stumble.
The last step is the ‘next pitch mentality’—a trait that sets elite athletes apart. They can play each point independently from the past or future, avoiding self-defeating mind games. Building this mental resilience is what sets Novak Djokovic and Michael Jordan apart. They can prioritise the present over the past in each moment. Being able to do this is what makes some people truly special. They look for the small, consistent wins from getting it right once in a row.
Consider Michael Jordan’s 12,345 missed shots in the NBA, some of which were end-of-game nail-biters. He failed repeatedly, but while this hurt in the moment, it gave him the fuel for his tenacity to keep coming back and cultivate resilience.
In my days as an investor, the mantra was, “You’re only as good as your last trade,” which reminded me of the transient nature of success. Instead of lamenting past failures or fretting over future pressures, you zero in on the one action you can control right now—the next move. From a failure perspective, focusing on the past is only suitable for extracting specific learning, and focusing on the future can paralyse us with the anxiety of failure.
You can’t rewrite yesterday; you can’t fast-forward to tomorrow. All we have is the present anyway, and by putting all our energy into what’s immediately in front of us, the fear of what’s behind or ahead fades.
We often forget that inaction leads to recurring self-doubt—far more painful than the short-term blow of a single failure. Looking back at life, we regret the shots we didn’t take more than the misses. Doing nothing means paying the toll of “What if?” for a lifetime, while a one-time flop costs you a moment of pride.
So, let’s stop treating failure as a cosmic punishment and understand that it is simply the consequence of the human act of trying.
You are not what you have achieved; you are what you have overcome. Please write it down, and next time you stumble, revisit it. Start a ‘failure log’ to track lessons learned and keep moving forward. This bears repeating:
Right now, write down one failure and a single lesson from it. Then, commit to one action—no matter how small—that turns it into forward momentum.
