What Did You Learn from Your Last Failure?
- Dave Anderson
- May 13
- 3 min read
“What did I just learn?”
When you fail, you have two choices. You can wallow in that failure or you can learn from it. It is your choice. The wisest people, the most successful leaders, do not see failure as the worst thing that can happen. They see failure without learning as the worst thing that can happen. When you have failed and you learn nothing from that failure, you waste life’s greatest learning laboratory.
Failure is essential to learning. You didn’t learn your math tables, how to drive, or become an expert in your field because you did everything right the first time you tried it. You failed once, twice, maybe multiple times. But each time you failed, you learned something new and grew. That is how you got good at that thing.
The problem many people have is that they see failure as a personal indictment of who they are. They believe that whatever they just failed at doing, will be their undoing. Some people try to hide their failures from others and may even delude themselves into thinking it was out of their control. When someone brushes past a failure and moves on like it is no big deal, they have just doomed themselves to mediocrity. When we pass the buck and say, “I couldn’t control it.”, we are convinced we have nothing to learn. Therefore, we stop growing.
I see it happen on teams all the time. I get to work with engineers, bankers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, cops, and fire personnel. I see many of these trained professionals walk away from a situation, a project, or an incident and miss the critical last step in the process. The last step they, and all of us, should be doing is stopping and asking ourselves: “What did I/we just learn?”
If more individuals and more teams paused after a failure and asked themselves this question, we would have a lot more wise and successful people in our midst. I called failure life’s greatest learning laboratory. But, so many leaders and teams ignore that opportunity to learn. Lot’s of times it is that individual’s pride that prevents them from taking a step into that lab. They do not want to face their shortcomings now, so they set themselves up for more failures in the future.
A project, a mission, an incident is not complete until you stop and ask yourself, “What did I just learn?” I had a coach who never berated me or dwelled on my failures. He just asked me, “What did you just learn?” He would not let me off the hook either. He forced me to stop and evaluate my thoughts, my words, and my actions before he would let me move on to the next thing. As a result, every success AND every failure became a learning laboratory that prepared me for the future tests I would face.
In the military they call these After Action Reviews. These are used by teams at the end of every mission - the successful missions and the screw ups. In fact, the mission is not completed until the AAR process is done. That ensures that every team and every team member is focused on growing and becoming wiser before the next mission.
If you want a free PDF outline of an AAR process, just email us at info@alslead.com and we will send it to you for you and your team to use.
Question:
- What failures have you learned from the most?
- When can you institute a personal or team AAR?
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