The Footnotes Blog

Photo belongs to James R. Howard

Most of us grow up thinking success means winning, zero-sum, full stop. You are either successful or you are not. Successful people never have to go back to the drawing board to retune their model or pick themselves up after a fall, at least that’s what we tell ourselves. But that’s not how life works; some of the most successful people are also some of the most frequent losers.

Photo belongs to James R. Howard

What’s worse, this misunderstanding is frequently reinforced through social media, where people tend to post their successes and leave out their setbacks, failures, and losses.

As a result of seeing people’s curated lives that omit their failures, it’s easy for someone to forget that others make mistakes too, and that can have crushing effects on our self-esteem and make us feel inferior or inadequate. Social media can also contribute towards decision paralysis, something I’ve talked about in a previous blog post that is detrimental to effective leadership. Social media is part of our daily lives in 2023, but that doesn’t mean this virtual reality we communicate in accurately shows the reality outside the internet, especially when it comes to being a successful leader.

Photo belongs to James R. Howard

If failure is part of life for everyone, so too is the opportunity for us to learn from our mistakes. Good leaders deploy effective strategies that allow them to learn from their failures. Sometimes failures are unavoidable, but there are also intelligent failures, as outlined in the Harvard Business Review’s article Strategies for Learning from Failure, providing competitive knowledge that helps an organization ensure future growth. We need to be humble and accept the lessons that come from failure, but above all, failure should not prevent you from achieving your goals and objectives. If successful leaders aren’t afraid of failure, what can our mistakes teach us?

Photo belongs to James R. Howard

We learn that good leaders don’t give up. Persistence for good leaders is the key to success. Persisting with your business idea, your passion project, your sport, will over time make you an expert at what you’re doing; motivate you to try harder; give you the opportunity to set a good example for others, and makes you aware of your weaknesses, a crucial step towards self-improvement and success. So get out there, and don’t be afraid to fail in pursuit of your dreams.