What’s your favorite failure?

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Imagine you’re a guest on Tim Ferriss’s podcast. He’s interviewing you about your success, you’re sharing your brilliance with his big audience, things are going well. Then he asks his favorite interview question: “What’s your favorite failure?”

Not your biggest or most unusual. Your favorite. He assumes that you failed at something that taught you something important or led you to something much better.

Because failures do that.

They reveal your weaknesses, errors in judgment, and areas you need to improve. So you can improve them. They teach you what doesn’t work, making it more likely that you’ll find what does. And they steer you towards different options, leading to better ideas and bigger results.

Ferriss told the story about how the failure of one of his books eventually led him to starting his podcast which has turned out to be one of his most remunerative and satisfying accomplishments.

Failures rock! Especially the big fugly ones.

When you experience a costly or embarrassing failure, the pain you feel motivates you to change. Without that pain, you might forget your mistakes and repeat them.

Don’t bury your failures, cherish them. Investments that went bad, projects that were dead on arrival, marriages that didn’t last. They taught you something you needed to learn. They prepared you for the next step.

But don’t dwell on your failures. Respect them and move on. Until you’re being interviewed and someone asks, “What’s your favorite failure?”

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