Maybe you’ve read Designing Your Life. It’s been big in the career exploration/life satisfaction space for a long time, for good reasons. I revisited it the other day and was struck by this productive exercise focused on failure, which I somehow had completely forgotten about.
The exercise is simple: note the failures over whatever timescale you find most reasonable, and categorize them. The categories are “screwup,” “weakness” and “growth opportunity”.
We all screw up, marking an appointment on the wrong day on our calendar or sending the email before we meant to. We can reduce but not eliminate screwups, knowing we’re human like everyone else. Weaknesses are familiar personal traits — a tendency to overcommit, or procrastinate, or gloss over details we find inconvenient. You can choose whether to focus on self-improvement and protective systems or avoiding circumstances where those weaknesses are going to sink a project. And then finally, there’s “growth opportunities” where you can recognize a mistaken assumption or a missing step or a necessary ingredient that the failure highlighted.
I love this framing, as a way of moving out of perfectionism, self-loathing, or negative self-talk following legitimate failures, into a mindspace for learning and self-acceptance and solutions.
