Failure Isn’t Really Failure

I was recently reading a rather old book on customer satisfaction by Bob Tasca. He had an interesting quote about failure.

“Failure isn’t failure at all—it’s information.”

Now, I am not saying to go out trying to fail just to gather information. But, when you try a lot of new things, you are going to make your share of mistakes.

The key is to not let yourself get discouraged, and if you are a leader, to not discourage your team. Always ask what was learned from the mistake, and what will be done differently the next time.

There are a bunch of variations of a quote attributed to Thomas Edison about his string of failures when trying to invent the light bulb. Supposedly, he was being questioned by a reporter about his progress, and said something along the lines of “I know a thousand ways not to make a light bulb.”

He learned from each failed attempt, and there’s a good chance that if you look up as you read this article, you’ll see the results of the information he gathered. The question for you is, “What information did you learn from your last failure?”