There are failures you can see coming.
You know you were underprepared. You know something went wrong. The outcome may still hurt, but it does not fundamentally challenge the way you see yourself.
Then there are failures that collide directly with what you believed was going to happen.
Mine arrived in an email.
I was completing the final year of my respiratory and sleep training. Academically, things had gone well. I had completed the master’s component with a distinction and spent around three years working within a hospital environment, supported by supervisors and mentors while learning how to assess patients, perform tests, interpret results and document clinical information.
The final hurdle was a practical assessment.
There were ten different stations covering different aspects of clinical practice. I needed to pass eight.
I walked out believing I had passed nine.
A few months later, the result arrived.
Fail.
The embarrassment was difficult. My supervisor had received the result too. After years of training, this was supposed to be the final sign-off before moving forward with my career.
But the most useful part of that experience was not simply that I had failed.
It was discovering why.
Failure Is Not Automatically a Lesson
We often hear some version of:
Failure is how you learn.
I don’t think that is quite accurate.
Failure gives us information.
Learning depends on what we do with that information.
We can experience an unwanted result and immediately blame someone else.
We can decide that the outcome proves we are incapable.
We can avoid putting ourselves in that position again.
Or we can keep repeating exactly the same approach while hoping the result eventually changes.
None of those responses necessarily produces learning.
For failure to become useful, we have to examine what happened.
What did I expect?
What actually happened?
Where was the gap?
And what does that gap tell me that I did not understand before?
The Mistake That Failed Me
My mistake sounded almost trivial.
I wrote the wrong date on a clinical report.
I had put the following day’s date on the paperwork without checking it.
That was enough to fail the assessment.
At first glance, it could be tempting to dismiss something like that as an administrative mistake.
But clinical documentation needs to be accurate.
Records may be used to establish when assessments, procedures and clinical decisions occurred. Being technically knowledgeable does not compensate for inaccurate documentation when patient care depends upon reliable information.
That exposed something important in my model of competence.
I had thought competence was primarily about understanding the science, interpreting results and communicating effectively with patients.
Those things mattered.
But my model was incomplete.
Professional competence also required organisation, accurate systems and attention to detail.
The exam revealed a blind spot that my previous successes had not.
When Expectation Meets Reality
The experience affected me so strongly because I had been confident about the outcome.
My expectation was:
I’m competent. I’ve done well. I’m going to pass.
Reality produced:
You failed.
I find it useful to think about that gap as a prediction error.
Something happened that did not fit the model I was using to predict what would happen next.
Instead of automatically interpreting that as:
“I’m not good enough.”
I could ask a more useful question:
“What is incomplete about my model?”
That distinction changed the experience.
The lesson was not that I knew nothing about respiratory science.
It was more specific.
I needed to become more organised, more precise and more attentive to details that I had underestimated.
So I changed.
And when I went back to repeat the assessment, I made absolutely sure I knew what date it was.
Resilience Requires More Than Persistence
This is where resilience becomes important.
Resilience is sometimes reduced to the idea of continuing no matter what.
But persistence without reflection can simply mean repeating an approach that does not work.
For me, resilience involves remaining flexible and adaptable when reality produces uncertainty, surprise or an outcome I did not expect.
It also involves recovery.
You need enough confidence to continue when something goes wrong.
But you also need enough humility to consider that reality may be showing you something your existing model has missed.
Too little confidence and failure makes you retreat.
Too little humility and failure teaches you nothing.
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Makes Failure Difficult to Avoid
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu has become one of the places where I practise this much more deliberately.
If I only roll with people I can beat, I can protect the belief that I am good at Jiu-Jitsu.
But I also remove many of the situations capable of showing me where my game is weak.
Getting swept gives me information.
Having my guard passed gives me information.
Getting submitted definitely gives me information.
Where was my weight?
Did I allow the underhook?
Was my elbow in the wrong position?
Where did I think I understood the position when I actually didn’t?
Jiu-Jitsu provides relatively immediate feedback.
Something fails and you can start investigating why.
That makes it an incredibly useful environment for learning to separate losing from being a loser.
They are not the same thing.
An unsuccessful outcome is information about what happened.
It does not have to become an identity.
Business Gives You Much Noisier Feedback
Entrepreneurship is harder in a different way.
The feedback is often delayed.
It is ambiguous.
And it is noisy.
You can spend months creating something without knowing whether anyone will want it.
A good offer can underperform because it reached the wrong people.
A useful idea can be communicated badly.
An advertisement can fail.
A project may need one adjustment — or the entire assumption behind it may be wrong.
That requires a difficult balance.
You need enough confidence to keep acting when the reward is delayed.
But you also need enough humility to recognise when reality repeatedly suggests that something is not working.
Persistence matters.
But persistence should not become blindness.
Productive and Unproductive Responses to Failure
I now find it more useful to think about productive and unproductive responses to failure.
A productive response can still involve disappointment.
You do not need to pretend that losing, failing or being wrong feels good.
You can experience the frustration.
Then investigate it.
Ask:
What did I expect to happen?
What actually happened?
Which assumption appears to have been wrong?
What could I adjust and test next?
Sometimes one small correction changes everything.
An unproductive response often turns the outcome into something much larger.
Instead of:
“That approach didn’t work.”
It becomes:
“I’m not good enough.”
Or:
“Everyone else is the problem.”
There will always be circumstances outside our control.
But if our interpretation protects us from examining our own assumptions, we may also protect ourselves from the information we need to improve.
Are You Updating Your Approach or Confirming Your Story?
One question captures this better than almost anything else for me:
Am I using this result to update my approach, or am I using it to confirm a story about myself?
The same failure can produce two very different trajectories.
One person uses it as evidence that they should stop.
Another becomes curious about what they have not understood yet.
My clinical assessment exposed a blind spot around organisation and detail.
Jiu-Jitsu continually exposes technical blind spots.
Entrepreneurship forces me to stay with uncertainty when the feedback takes longer to interpret.
Across all three, the common thread is not failure itself.
It is becoming less defensive when reality contradicts what I thought was true.
Protecting Competence Can Prevent Growth
There is safety in doing things we already know we are good at.
They protect our identity.
They confirm our existing model of ourselves.
But there is a cost.
If we only enter situations where success is likely, we reduce our exposure to surprise.
And surprise is often where the useful information is.
So I keep returning to three questions:
Where are you protecting your sense of competence when you might benefit from discovering what you don’t know yet?
Where are you willing to be wrong so you can eventually become right?
Where are you willing to look inexperienced long enough to eventually develop mastery?
Learning from failure can happen, but failure does not automatically make us better.
But if we can stay with the disappointment, examine the difference between expectation and reality, and remain willing to update our model, failure can reveal exactly where the next stage of learning needs to begin.
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