Lessons Learned from Personal Failure
It is popularly said that experience is the best teacher. But it has been challenged by several thinkers. For instance, John Maxwell, acclaimed to be the number one leadership expert in the world, asserts:
“experience is NOT the best teacher, but EVALUATED EXPERIENCE is”
I will be sharing what I learnt from my personal failure and how that has served me ever since. I will also share how I used the learning from that experience to save my employer during a major project failure.
The story goes back very many years ago. I was then in junior high school, year 8 to be exact. Ours, a technical school, was moving away from pure craft training to a more broad-based education by introducing Literature in English and many such subjects. For most of us that was a very novel experience, and we had no seniors to learn from.
Yours truly was regarded as a very bright student, having completed elementary school with Distinction in the West African Examination Council (WAEC) First School Leaving Certificate Examination, and having led the entire Year 7 the previous year, along with my best friend, Sunny.
Sunny and I had many things in common; we were voracious readers and we played soccer, although I was more of a soccer fanatic! My case was so bad that if somebody passed out and I was sent to bring water to revive him, that person would die if I found people playing soccer along the way. I would not remember the errand until the game was over!
So, I was playing soccer this evening when Sunny returned from the teacher’s house with our scores in literature. He called me out from the field and showed me my result. He passed. I had failed! I was shocked. I was confused. I was angry all at once. I was limp; I could not continue with the game anymore. We left and headed home. I was not myself for days. You know, I was not used to failure. It was a very strange experience for me.
When the dust finally settled, I started asking questions and searching for answers. Socrates is quoted as saying:
“the quality of a person’s life will always be in direct proportion to the quality of question that person is willing to ask themselves.”
I asked some of my friends in other schools: “what do the teachers expect?”; ”How do you answer questions in literature”, etc. And they were quite generous with answers and guidance.
Fortunately for me, that result was not published. So, there is no record in the school that I failed literature. But the next exam I passed with a score of 60%. My score in my final exam in literature was 92%. Failure can be an opportunity for accelerated learning. I learned from my failure.
This has been my approach to failure ever since:
- grieve if necessary
- be brutally honest with yourself
- step back and analyze the situation
- identify what went wrong and what you need to do differently
- seek advice from those who have demonstrable proof of success
- Apply the lessons.
There is no guaranty that one will not fail again. But it will not be on the same point.
Have I failed again after that? Many times! But in different areas.
Michael Hyatt, the former Chairman and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, said:
“Failure can be a great teacher, but we have to listen.“
One of my former employers failed to listen to the teaching of failure. We had won a construction contract worth over USD 140 million. We made many blunders that resulted in many defects and delayed project completion, causing the frustrated client to cancel the contract. Our company was furious. They sacked the engineers right from the project site. That episode reminds me of the following humor about project phases:
- Wild enthusiasm
- Feverish activity
- Disillusionment
- Total confusion
- Search for the guilty
- Punishment of the innocent
- Promotion of non-participants
It aptly describes the situation in our organization at that time.
I was alarmed because we were about to miss a rare opportunity to learn from our experience. I met with one of our superiors and advised that though the loss of the contract was very painful, not learning from it with a view to preventing reoccurrence would be an even greater loss. Thankfully, wisdom prevailed, and the key engineer was reinstated, as first step to post-implementation review and lessons learned.
Well, the path of success is littered with failure. Those who succeed do not do so because they never failed, but they succeed because they learnt from their failure.
So next time you fail, do not be discouragement take over. Apply what John Maxwell calls ‘The 24 hours Rule’: Grieve over your failure or celebrate your success for only 24 hours, and move on. Thereafter, evaluate the experience, learn from it, and try again. Make failure your friend by taking advantage of the lessons. Then you will discover that failure may well be the first step in your journey to success and significance.
