Everyone celebrates failure now. Fail fast, fail forward, the only real failure is not trying. The TED talks, the podcasts, the hot takes on resilience and grit. Failure gets repackaged as the price of growth, the prerequisite for success.
It's all true. And it's all incomplete.
Nobody talks about what failure actually costs in the moment. When the deal blows up, people leave, confidence cracks. When the thing you built falls apart and you have to walk through the office knowing it was your misjudgment. When the team absorbs the failure and some of them decide to leave because they've lost faith in your ability to lead them somewhere.
It's lived, not discussed in retrospect.
I lost a major deal once. A year of work. A relationship I'd invested in, a strategy I'd staked my reputation on. I got confident. I stopped listening. I heard what I wanted to hear and missed what was actually being said. Customer went to a competitor.
Visible loss. Not humiliating exactly, but people knew I'd missed something. People whispered about whether I still had it. And I knew they were right to wonder, because in that moment, I didn't know either.
What lodged deeper was how the failure changed how I saw myself. I was the person who'd misjudged the customer, who'd overestimated his own instincts, who'd let the team down. That story became real in a way that's hard to come back from.
I know a baseball player named Jimmy Piersall. Had a mental breakdown in the middle of his career, mid-game, on the field. Screaming at the umpire, losing control. They had to remove him. The breakdown became the thing everyone knew about him, the story that preceded him.
But here's what people sometimes forget. The breakdown was real. The recovery was real. He kept playing. He dealt with the mental illness, came back, had a career. But the cost of the breakdown itself, the public nature of it, the way it shaped how he was seen, that doesn't disappear just because he recovered.
Success and failure are partners, not opposites. You can't have one without the other being possible. But the culture treats them like enemies. Fail and you're reckless. Succeed and you're brilliant. The same decision can be either, depending on outcome.
Failure isn't good. It's expensive. Organizations that acknowledge the expense are the ones that actually learn from it.
Most organizations don't. They either punish failure so harshly that people stop taking risks, or they celebrate it so loudly that it becomes a PR exercise. Neither one creates an environment where people can actually learn.
What does is an organization led by someone who's had the breakdown themselves. Who knows what it feels like to lose confidence. Who understands that the damage isn't just the business impact, it's the internal reckoning. Whether you can trust your own judgment.
I lost the deal. And I learned something. Not because the failure was good, but because I took the time to understand what went wrong. I stopped moving fast enough to avoid the discomfort. I sat with it.
The person I became after that was more careful, more humble, more willing to listen. But that person was also more afraid. It took work to get the fear to a place where it was useful instead of paralyzing.
Nobody talks about getting back.
I watch leaders who've never had a real failure and I see the fear underneath. They're moving at maximum speed because stopping would mean confronting the possibility that they don't have it figured out. The culture they create is frantic. The people who work for them sense it. They become frantic too.
The alternative isn't recklessness. It's acknowledging that failure is the price of anything that matters. And that the organization's job is to help people absorb it, learn from it, and show up differently next time.
It requires a leader who's paid the price themselves. Who knows that the breakdown doesn't disqualify you, but it does change you. That you come back smaller and more honest. That the confidence you rebuild is different from the confidence you had before, because it's based on something real instead of on invincibility.
In a fear-based organization, failure becomes the enemy. People sandbag. They take minimal risks. They protect themselves instead of the mission. The organization becomes cautious and slow.
In an organization led by someone who understands the cost and can absorb it, people take real risks. They fail differently. They fail fast, learn fast, and then they come back and try again.
The difference isn't in the amount of failure. It's in what happens afterward.
I'm not celebrating what happened with the deal. But I'm also not pretending it didn't happen or that it didn't matter. It happened. It cost something. It changed me. And the organization that was paying attention to that cost became better because of it.
Failure teaches. But the tuition is real, and somebody has to pay it. A leader who won't acknowledge what the tuition runs is asking the team to absorb a price that stays invisible. That's exploitation wearing the mask of motivation.
The breakdown can be the turning point. But you don't arrive there by pretending the breakdown didn't hurt. You arrive by sitting with it long enough to learn something.