Why it Matters - Building Resilience & Grit - Learning from Failure

Building resilience & grit.

Failure is an inherent component of innovation and professional growth, serving as essential data for future success. Michael Jordan, who experienced numerous career setbacks, framed failure as a precondition for achievement: “I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed”. This perspective establishes success as a statistically dependent outcome, requiring high volumes of experimentation and occasional failure.

The key to resilience lies in learning. Barack Obama emphasized the instructive value of setbacks: “You can't let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you”. Paul Allen reinforced the conditional nature of this learning: “In my experience, each failure contains the seeds of your next success - if you are willing to learn from it”. The willingness to analyse failure objectively determines whether a setback leads to growth or merely stagnation.

Grit is the perseverance required to navigate the iterative nature of innovation, exemplified by the statement: “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”. The practise of resilience involves treating failure as strategic market research data. Just as Deming suggested that opinions are worthless without data, a failed marketing initiative is valuable empirical evidence of what does not resonate with the market. Resilient marketers systematically collect, analyse, and iterate based on this failure data, using it to refine their strategy, much like the process outlined in Design Thinking.

British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, champions resilience through an explicit acceptance of failure, advising, ‘Do not be embarrassed by your failures; learn from them and start again,’ thereby normalising the process of iteration and bold risk-taking within the entrepreneurial journey.

"Why It Matters" offers a collection of afterthoughts for my marketing students, specifically designed to deepen their understanding of the week's topic. It provides crucial added insights to the content explored in each workshop.