Don’t Underestimate the Impact of Waiting to Learn from Failure
It’s easy to see an opportunity and choose to wait to act on it because you assume you have time. It’s also easy to experience failure and just assume you’ll eventually learn from it just because that’s what people say happens.
However, the truth is you will miss out on most opportunities and won’t learn from most failures if you wait to act. Never once does it cross your mind the consequences for doing nothing. You just don’t know what you don’t know, so you just move on.
The fact is opportunities don’t last long, particularly opportunities to learn from failure. To learn from failure you must “tune-in” as research from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business suggest. In other words, learning from failure requires paying close attention to the details, details you will not remember if you wait.
Simply stated, to learn from failure you must reflect on the root causes of that failure and then do something intentional about it. You get one opportunity to do this, and that’s immediately after you fail. The impact of waiting is that you won’t learn anything except vague “feel good” ideas. This may make you feel good about saying you learned something from your failure, but as research suggests, you won’t truly be making progress.