You Grow as Strong as the Number of Your Failures

Our Senior Managing Director has a line that thrills me: "My strength is experience no one in this company can match — in other words, an absurdly large number of failures." Declaring your failure count as a strength: that is our culture. My own judgment today was built almost entirely from failures, not successes.

Success obscures its own recipe — luck and timing blur it. Failure engraves "do this, and that happens" into your bones. A person with ten failures knows the location of ten landmines; the path they avoid can be trusted.

I never blame failure that follows a challenge — only the refusal to challenge, and the same failure repeated three times. Your failure count is your experience score.

What do you work for?