Getting a Return on Failure

There is a common fear among our entire world when it comes to taking bold steps of faith in getting something we ultimately want. That is the fear of failure, whether it's as little as asking the cute girl out that sits next to you in class or as big as starting the company that could change the lives of millions. To some degree we have all avoided doing something we ultimately wanted because of the fear of failure.

Are You Living, or Are You Living and Learning?

That question is exactly how it sounds. Most people live, but great people live and learn. In the past I have caught myself living and not learning from my shortcomings. Early in my life the word failure wasn't even in my vocabulary, which may sound like a good thing, but what makes it not good is that because failure wasn't something I worried about, neither was learning from my mistakes. This caused me to make repeated mistakes that, if I had learned from the first time, would have saved me a lot of pain, frustration, and heartache.

It's okay to live your life. In fact, I encourage you to live your life. But taking the time to think and reflect on your shortcomings can save you a lot of pain and a lot of repeated mistakes. I know that firsthand, because the times I skipped that step are the times I paid for it twice.

How Do I Learn From My Failures?

There are a lot of cliche terms in the self improvement industry, like "failing forward" and "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." There's nothing wrong with them, but what does getting a return on failure actually look like? To me it looks like creating a formal failure review process.

After a meaningful failure, ask:

1. 01What happened? Describe the facts without making excuses or putting a spin on it.
2. 02Why did it happen? Look beyond the first, easy explanation. Find the root cause.
3. 03What was under control? What did you actually control in this? Avoid blaming others and feeling helpless.
4. 04What did it cost? Measure the financial, relational, operational, and reputational impact.
5. 05What did it reveal? Did it reveal a bad habit, a weakness in judgment, or a gap in systems, training, communication, or culture?
6. 06What changes now? Assign specific actions to avoid the failure happening again.
7. 07How will we know the lesson was learned? Define measurables that can be clearly observed to tell whether the failure is happening again.

The key in all of this is that a failure only produces a return when the lesson creates a change.

A Failure I'm Still Paying For

Here's a real one, from our own agency. We built out a team of outbound cold callers, a move that worked well enough early on that other agencies around Lubbock started copying it. But we launched the team without a real onboarding or training structure behind it. We built the team before we built the system.

We are still paying for that. We are still having to train that original team on cold calling and sales fundamentals they should have had from day one, and the lack of a real plan slowed our ability to scale to where we should already be.

Run it through the questions above and the lesson gets specific fast. What happened: we scaled a team before we built the structure to support it. What was under our control: all of it, the timing, the hiring, the decision to launch without onboarding. What did it cost: real time, real training hours, and real ground on our scaling timeline. What did it reveal: the gap wasn't in the idea, cold calling worked, it was in our onboarding and structure.

What changed: we completely rewrote our onboarding process and built a full sales process from scratch, call scripts, exact quoting steps, follow up cadence, and binding process, all of it. How we'll know the lesson stuck: the next team we bring on won't need six months of on the job correction to do the job we hired them for. That's the standard now, and it's how we'll know whether we actually learned anything or just talked about it.

That's the difference between a failure that just hurts and a failure that actually teaches you something.

Don't Let Failure Become Your Identity

The biggest thing to avoid when it comes to failure is not letting it become your identity. Failure is not final. While failure may sometimes need to confront your ego, it should never become your identity.

Scripture backs this up, and you see it clearly in the life of Peter. Before the crucifixion, Peter denied Christ three times. That failure came at the feet of pride. He did it for three reasons:

1. 01He placed himself above others. Peter said the other disciples might desert Jesus, but he never would.
2. 02Peter believed he knew himself better than Jesus did.
3. 03Peter believed he was stronger than he really was.

While Peter denied Jesus three times, that failure became part of his testimony, not the conclusion of his life. You see him in passages like Acts 2, where he stands in front of a large crowd in Jerusalem, just weeks after Jesus was crucified, and boldly proclaims Christ and what he can do for those in the crowd. Because of that proclamation, about 3,000 people were saved that day. There's one thing worth highlighting about Peter's redemption. Before it, he was losing hope in his calling and had returned to his old occupation of fishing. But because of Jesus' love and grace, he was given the courage and faith to return to his calling, the same calling that let him lead 3,000-plus people to Christ just days later.

This is what we mean when we say Fear Not. Peter's fear didn't disqualify him. It was the thing he had to move through to get to the calling on the other side.

While failure feels scary before it happens, it is necessary to be able to learn and grow into who God has called us to be. Failure is only scary when you let it become who you are, instead of what turns you into who you're supposed to be.

Bet on the dream.