Do people "fail forward?"

Something I saw on a weekly LinkedIn email blast prompted me to write about the following topic.


There's something that I often find troubling when considering the way that people react to events. I've noticed that people are quick to assume responsibility for things that work out but often shy away from accepting responsibility for failure.

And why? Failure, in my view, is one of the fundamental building blocks of success. In fact, most things in my life I've gotten because I've failed at something, taken ownership of it, and then did not perform that activity again. Basically, each failure you have is a stepping stone that makes you better and better and better...Eventually you'll be absolutely amazing and still failing forward.

Seeing things through that lens, could you really call it failure at all? I tend not to. I call things events. Sometimes events have favorable outcomes and sometimes they have negative outcomes, but it is our emotional connection to those events that usually decides whether something was good or bad. It has been said that there are no good and evil people, only people who make decisions some agree with and others do not. In the same vein, there are no good or bad events - it's all what you make of it.