My dad was a bi-vocational pastor for much of his life. Every Sunday and Wednesday night for over 6 years, we drove 50 miles (one-way) to the small town of Heavener, OK, where Dad was leading a fledgling congregation. On Sundays, we would stay with one of the local families to avoid two back-and-forth trips each week.
One of the families we often stayed with had a huge garden behind their home. Dad and Uncle Charlie (as we called him) spent a lot of time in the garden. Dad asked a lot of questions, and Charlie was full of answers. He would not only instruct, Charlie would also provide my Dad opportunities to try his hand at gardening.
Fast forward a few years, and my Dad had stepped down from this pastoral role. We relocated to Russellville, AR, where my dad began a long career selling furniture. As I started to attend the local college, Dad decided he would make Uncle Charlie proud and started digging up our backyard and planted a garden.
Dad’s initial foray into gardening was simple: strawberries, carrots, tomatoes, and corn. Every night, after work, Dad would wander into the backyard and meticulously weed, water, and nurture his fledgling garden. After a few weeks of patient persistence, Dad started to collect the fruit of his labor: strawberries, carrots, tomatoes, and sweet corn.
The spring semester of my sophomore year in college, I came home from school early. After enjoying some lunch, I looked into the backyard and recalled an earlier conversation with my Dad about the need to till the garden to prepare it for planting. So I got what I thought was a brilliant idea. I would surprise my dad and till the garden before he got home.
I pulled the heavy tiller from the shed, started it up, put the tines into the ground, and started tilling. Back and forth I went, breaking up the dark, rich dirt. After three or four good passes, you could smell the richness of the soil. Dad would be surprised when he got home.
A few hours later, he arrived. I couldn’t wait to show him what I had done. As soon as he walked in, I guided him out the back door to show him my handiwork. To my surprise, my Dad wasn’t nearly as excited as I thought he would be. He kept muttering, “The strawberries, the strawberries…”
What I didn’t know was that, in Arkansas, the best time to plant strawberries is in September to early October, allowing the roots to establish before winter so they could produce a full harvest by the following spring. In my zeal to do something to help my dad, I had destroyed all the hard work he had put in that fall to prepare the strawberries for growth.
I made a mistake. I could try to deny it, which was hard to do when you just bragged on tilling the garden. Or, I could admit it, own it, ask for forgiveness, and learn from it.
That’s the funny thing about mistakes. You can learn from them, or you get to repeat them.
I owned it.
Better yet, I learned from it. Dad was gracious, and while he brought up the strawberries he didn’t get to enjoy that year, his garden did produce one of the best harvests ever. Dad made sure I didn’t forget my mistake that year, so I didn’t repeat it in the future.
In April, 2017, I traveled to Orlando FL, with my daughter, Jessie, to attend the International Maxwell Conference. It was there that Jessie got to meet Dr. John Maxwell for the first time. Having taught on the subject of failure, Dr. John brought it home when he said:
“You’re going to make some mistakes in life. You’re going to experience failure. It’s OK. This is how we learn. My advice to you is to fail early, fail often, but make sure you fail forward.”
So, Dr. John Maxwell, the world’s foremost authority on leadership, is telling my daughter, Jessie, to fail more often, to make more mistakes. That’s his leadership advice? I was hoping for “Everything rises and falls on leadership,” or “Leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less.”
What she got instead was, “Fail early, fail often, but make sure you fail forward.”
Turns out, that’s pretty good advice.
In life, we’re going to make mistakes. There will be times we fail. When that happens, we’ve got one of two available options. We can either learn from our mistakes or we get to repeat them again in the future.
It’s Plan A or Plan B. There is no Plan C.
As Dr. John says, “Sometimes we win, sometimes we learn.”
We’ve been failing our way to success since the time we were born. Not a single one of us was successful, at least at first, at everything we had to learn as we grew from infancy to adulthood. It was through learning what not to do that we eventually figured out what to do. Through this process, we learned to crawl, sit, stand, talk, walk, run, eat, sing, dance, feed ourselves, ride a bike, climb a tree, write our name, color inside the lines, and more.
It was through learning what not to do that we eventually figured out what to do.
Learning became a valuable byproduct of failure.
It was through this process that we discovered learned industriousness.
According to this behavioral theory espoused by Robert Eisenberger, when we make the effort, even when we fail, the fact that we made the effort becomes a reward in itself. It makes hard work feel rewarding and inspires us to continue. This helps us look beyond the failure, appreciate the effort, and acknowledge the lesson learned so we can try again and again until we succeed.
Making the effort becomes its own reward.
Henry Ford understood this. The founder of Ford Motor Company challenged his engineers in the 1930s to cast an 8-cylinder engine in a single one-piece block. Time and again, they failed. They told Mr. Ford this couldn’t be done. His response to them was priceless: “Produce it anyway.” After a year of learning from failure, they succeeded.
Retelling the story, Ford told an audience, “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
Thomas Edison also understood the power of learned industriousness. This prolific inventor failed his way to success hundreds of times over his illustrious career. When asked by reporters about his secret to success, he quipped, “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to success is always to try just one more time.”
When we see the value in the effort as a learning opportunity, we realize that we will either succeed or learn something that will move us closer to success. Making the effort becomes its own reward, even as it pushes us ever closer to achieving a win.
From the time we’re born, we all go through a distinct, six-part learning process. This cycle of learning, comprised of six stages, allows us to acquire new skills throughout our lives. It also highlights that true growth only happens when we push ourselves outside the comfort zone of the status quo into that uncomfortable place where learning happens.
This framework reveals to us that frustration and mistakes are not signs of failure, but indications that we are actually learning, growing, and improving.
The first stage is knowledge. This is where you’re introduced to new information, concepts, or skills. You understand what needs to be learned, but have little or no experience applying it. Until you know what you don’t know, you don’t know what you don’t know. Curiosity is critical here, as this drives our desire to know.
Stage two of learning is practice. This is when you begin to apply the knowledge you’ve acquired. This stage of learning is marked by an intentional effort to perform the skill or task. It is not yet natural, so you’re expending a lot of physical and mental effort as you’re consciously focusing on performance.
It’s in this phase that we are building the foundation upon which success can be built. We cultivate the ability to recognize, value, assimilate, and apply what we’re learning.
Discomfort is the third stage of learning. This is the critical “learning zone” where the skill or task feels difficult, awkward, or frustrating. What you’re learning feels like it is just beyond your current capability, which is necessary for growth. Remember, it is in that uncomfortable place that growth happens and we learn new things.
Here, we’re experiencing frustration and failure. The more mistakes we learn in this stage, the faster the improvements we will make. This is the “messy middle” of the learning process, as we’ve got to learn to tolerate frustration. It’s easy to believe that learning should be fast and comfortable, but acquiring real skill takes time, and it’s a messy process.
The fourth stage is more practice. This is the “repetition zone” where continual practice allows us to hone our skills, receive ongoing feedback, and learn from our mistakes. This stage of learning demands a higher level of intensity as we’re moving beyond the basics toward an effective use of this skill in our lives.
As long as we’re learning from our mistakes, we can move to the next level of learning. Simply repeating a skill isn’t enough. Effective practice requires pushing beyond your comfort zone so we can create constant, continual, never-ending improvement.
Progress is the fifth stage of learning. This is where purposeful repetition results in continual improvement. It’s in this phase that we begin to master parts of this skill. The task feels less taxing, and we feel more confident as we’re starting to internalize this skill.
The sixth stage of learning is comfort. At this point, the skill has been mastered to a point where it can be performed with “unconscious competence.” In martial arts, we refer to this as “Mushin,” literally “no mind.” The mind has internalized this skill, and it can be performed almost without conscious thought.
It’s at this stage that the cycle begins again. Once a skill is internalized and mastered, we get to re-enter the knowledge zone and repeat the process of learning and mastering something new. It’s also an opportunity to deepen our learning of what we’ve internalized, taking mastery to an even deeper, more meaningful level.
Let’s return to where we started this lesson and revisit failure. Remember what Dr. John told my daughter, Jessie? “You’re going to make some mistakes in life. You’re going to experience failure. It’s OK. This is how we learn. My advice to you is to fail early, fail often, but make sure you fail forward.”
Henry Ford noted, “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” Thomas Edison said, “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”
Did these men understand something about failure that we need to learn?
There are only two possible outcomes to any effort we attempt: success or failure. Both can teach us valuable lessons, provided we’re open and willing to learn.
What I’ve learned from failure over the years is that it is a powerful teacher that fosters resilience, self-awareness, and innovation by highlighting exactly what or where we need to improve. It reveals what we need to learn (or perhaps unlearn) to learn and grow.
If we use failure as a learning opportunity, the lessons it teaches strengthen our neural pathways so we avoid repeating the same (or similar) mistakes. It makes us better at who we are and what we do. Failure can also fuel creativity, foster curiosity, and inspire innovation, ultimately serving as necessary steps toward success.
That’s the funny thing about failure. You can learn from it, or you get to repeat it.
Four quick lessons from failure as we wrap up this week’s lesson.
First, failure can provide valuable self-reflection. It forces us to re-evaluate the decisions we’ve made, often revealing the root causes of mistakes in the process. It’s through this “triple insight” process that we learn, unlearn, and explore what to do differently.
Failure strengthens our resilience and mental resolve. As we build mental toughness and emotional intelligence, we learn to pivot, innovate, and persevere rather than give up or quit.
One of my favorite lessons from failure is using it as a growth accelerator, shifting my perspective from “I can’t do that” to “I can’t do that yet.” Using learned industriousness, I can lean into continual effort to learn and grow until I get to “I can do that, and I will.”
Failure reveals what doesn’t work, so we can explore other options until we find what does work. It’s through this learning process that we not only learn what not to do, but we also uncover better strategies that we might have otherwise overlooked or ignored.
Lastly, failure teaches us to be humble and accountable. Remember, when it comes to mistakes, we can deny them or own them. When we admit our mistakes, we own them. When we take responsibility for our actions, it makes it easier for us to ask for help. It also makes it easier for others to see our humility and be willing to lend a hand to help.
When we make more mistakes, we make faster improvements in our lives. We get smarter, we gain courage, we learn to laugh at ourselves, and we expand our comfort zone.
Let me leave you with three quotes I shared earlier:
“You’re going to make some mistakes in life. You’re going to experience failure. It’s OK. This is how we learn. My advice to you is to fail early, fail often, but make sure you fail forward.”
~ Dr. John C. Maxwell
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
~ Henry Ford
“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”
~ Thomas Edison
A funny thing about failure. We can learn from it and get smarter, or we can ignore it and repeat that lesson until we learn it.
I’ve made failure a teacher and a friend, understanding its mission is to make me better.
I want to get better, so I’m OK with that.
How about you?
