Three Questions You Must Ask Yourself If You Want to Learn from Failure
We all know the concept of failing forward. Using failure as an opportunity to learn is basically as cliché as it gets in the self-help world. But as cliché as it may be, the opportunity to learn from failure remains just that, an opportunity. Furthermore, learning from failure is an opportunity most people don’t take advantage of because learning from failure is hard.
It’s hard because to learn from failure you must focus on what caused the failure while separating your ego from those causes. Your ego is going to tell you that you failed because of bad luck, chance, or some other factor you don’t control. Outsmarting your ego by ignoring everything that is not within your control takes practice.
This practice begins by following a repeatable process to reverse engineer the causes of failure that are within your control. So, if you currently don’t have a repeatable process like this, I suggest you start by using simple “one thing” questions.
The purpose of a “one thing” question is to make it easy to reflect on the root causes of failure and then do something intentional about it.
My recommendation is that each time you experience a failure, start with these three basic questions:
- What one thing can I start doing differently based on learning from someone else related to this failure? (For example, a peer success story, opponent, judge, coaching feedback, etc.)
- What one thing can I practice over and over again that will prevent a failure like this in the future?
- What one thing can I do to track my improvement, so I know I have learned from this failure?
The next time you find yourself in a position to learn from failure don’t just give it lip service. It sounds so, so good to say there is no failure, only learning. Especially in the moments immediately following a failure. However, the truth is that you must follow through on a process like this if you truly want to learn.