My first favorite failure
Lessons learned from messing up
I spent all semester working on a team project for my Innovation Studio. We put in a lot of time, sweat, blood, tears, and possibly a few other bodily fluids. We did our due diligence. We felt pretty confident.
And the judges basically hated it.
As I sat there listening to the critique, I had this weird out of body experience. I just felt oddly okay with everything. I didn’t even want to push back much — I mean how do you argue with someone’s, like, opinion, man?
We clarified our position. The judges asked us why we didn’t include that in the presentation, and what do you say to that? We forgot, I guess. We effed up.
I thought I would be more upset, or really that I should be more upset, but I wasn’t. I used to really struggle with criticism, and would work so hard, motivated out of fear of getting any critique, and negative feedback used to devastate me. I remember how awful I used to feel anytime I auditioned in orchestra or when I’d have to give presentations in class. If I was anything less than perfect, I’d feel mortified.
Feeling good about my failure yesterday was a huge success for me.
What I learned from this failure:
I can handle critique and so can you. Surprise, not surprise. I could always accept it, but I used to let it hurt me too much. This time I held it without letting it sink in too deep. Accepting it doesn’t mean making it a part of you.
If you’re playing it safe all the time, you’re doing something wrong. I talked to a friend who’s in the year ahead of me, and she told me that she once got feedback from a professor who said, “When you started out your presentation, I was excited. Then it got worse. And it got worse and worse every minute. It was so bad it was like a slap in the face.” My critique wasn’t quite that bad, but it was a little jarring to hear, “This is an MBA program!”
Failure is a great way to recalibrate. Okay, so now I know what to do better next time. How can you learn anything if you always succeed? How can you get better if you think you’re perfect? I’m grateful for failure because now I have a hundred new ideas for how to do it better next time.
