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- ✍️DraftedWednesday, May 27, 2026 at 7:49 PM
- ✓Approved by clientMonday, July 20, 2026 at 12:45 PM
FAIL: First Attempts In Learning
Every leader I work with has a different relationship with the word failure. Most of them were trained to avoid it. That is not their fault. It is the design of most organizations. Here is the reframe I use. FAIL. First Attempts In Learning. Not a verdict. Not an identity. A step in a sequence. The reason most leaders stop taking risks is not that they stopped believing in the work. It is that somewhere in their career, a failure became a label they wore. They learned to avoid the label. They stopped taking the risks that would have produced the learning. The word you carry shapes what you do next. If failure is the end of a story, you protect yourself from it. If it is the first line of one, you get to work. I made a whole company out of that difference. Every leader reading this can name one failure in the last quarter they have been treating as a verdict instead of a first attempt. What did you call a failure last quarter that was really just a first attempt? Everyone fails. Winners Fail Forward.
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