Failure doesn’t conjure good thoughts. It means you’ve fallen flat on your face, stopped in your tracks, lost money, or missed that game-winning field goal as time expired.
When you have witnesses, it’s double the fun.
Michael Jordan said, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life.”
The incredible Roger Federer, one of the greatest living tennis players, won only 52% of his total points. Professional baseball players who hit the ball 3 out of 10 times end up in the Hall of Fame. Even the best at their craft suffer the sting of failure, not just once but over and over again.
Jordan finished by stating, “And that is why I succeed.”
It’s challenging to reframe failure into a positive when it happens because it hurts, but let’s take a crack anyway.
Why Failure Hits
When the cave dwellers roamed the earth, they either caught and killed dinner or were dinner. From an evolutionary standpoint, negative feedback kept them alive.
Our nervous system evolved to prioritize errors, threats, and criticism because they signaled danger. The Brain treats negative feedback as vital information. That wiring didn’t disappear because we now sit behind a desk instead of roaming the plains.
Here are a few other reasons why failure hits.
The Brain Has a Built-In Negativity Bias: Negative experiences carry more weight than positive ones of equal intensity because the Brain encodes negative information more quickly, more deeply, and for longer. It’s not pessimism, it’s pattern recognition aimed at preventing future mistakes.
Negative Feedback Feels Actionable: I’m fortunate to have people praise my work. Although it feels great to be appreciated, the feeling is fleeting. That’s similar to positive feedback, which often sounds like: “Great job.”
Nice… but vague. Negative feedback often sounds like:
“You lost your brace at the bottom.”
“Your email lacked clarity.”
“You rushed that decision.”
It points to specific gaps that give the Brain something to fix, because humans are problem-solvers. We get traction from friction.
Discomfort Creates Attention: Positive feedback feels good, but it doesn’t demand change. When facing failure and/or negative feedback, you feel pain and a sense of urgency. That discomfort heightens attention and memory, and it’s the same reason you remember your worst moments with clarity. We don’t like negative feedback or failure, but we evolve because of it.
Turning Failure Into Feedback
I’ve been fired from every writing job except one. I’ve launched programs that bombed. There was a time when I was enemy number one because of my combustible anger.
There’s nothing like a marriage breakdown or your kids hating you to turn impending failure into feedback that brings about positive change.
But failure is a double-edged sword. On one edge, it hurts so much that you never want to feel that way again. You curl up into a ball and avoid it. On the other edge, it fuels improvement because you never want to feel that way again. Great athletes, business people, writers, inventors, and entertainers all taste the bitter pill of failure.
Inner drive, talent, motivation, persistence, and being hard-headed all help you recover from failure to go again. But turning it into feedback requires a mindset shift, so you can see what happened and how to do better next time.
Here are two shifts to wrap your mind around.
Separate Outcome From Identity
Many people don’t fear failure; they fear what it says about them when everyone is watching. When it all goes wrong, your Brain defaults to a character judgment of failure.
“The article flopped.” → “I’m not a real writer.”
“I missed the lift.” → “I’m weak.”
“The client quit.” → “I’m a bad coach.”
Once failure becomes identity-based, learning stops because the Brain shifts from problem-solving to self-protection. You no longer think about how to fix it, but how to avoid feeling this way again.
Instead of saying:
“I failed.”
You say this:
“Method failed.”
“Attempt failed.”
“Strategy didn’t hold under pressure.”
You’re not excusing the result but locating the error where it belongs. Identity stays intact, learning stays online, and you begin to turn failure into feedback.
Expect Failure When You’re Doing Hard Work
When you’ve been doing something for a while, you feel you’re good at it, you get paid well for it, and people sing your praises, something subconscious happens:
“If I’m good at something, I shouldn’t struggle.” That belief is poison.
Struggle isn’t evidence of incompetence; it’s evidence of exposure to the edge of your current capacity. If you never miss a weight that’s too light or a goal that’s too small, there’s no friction because you’re just cruising.
When you’re doing hard work and expect failure as part of it, you:
Detach emotion from outcome
Recover Faster
Detach emotion from outcome
No friction = no adaptation.
People who live on the edge of their capacity are going to miss, just as Michael Jordan did. Instead of thinking you can’t fail, brace yourself for it if it happens.
Combine this with the short memory of a baseball player who forgets about the other 7 times he failed, to hit a walk-off grand slam at the bottom of the 9th to win the World Series.
That’s how you turn failure into feedback that hits.
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