Have you ever seen someone say "I tried this and it didn't work out" in a meeting?
I haven't seen it often. In most meetings, success stories are shared and successful projects get the spotlight. Stories of failure are quietly buried or never brought up at all. Honest talk only comes out in anonymous surveys, and few people are willing to attach their name to failure.
Why is that? Fear of looking incompetent. Worry about disadvantages for future opportunities. Concern about others' perceptions. The reasons vary, but the result is the same. Failure becomes something to hide, and we lose the opportunity to learn from it.
What Happens When We Avoid Failure
When we fear failure, we reduce our attempts altogether.
We try to do only what's certain. Proven methods, things others have done, things with low probability of failure. This feels safe in the short term. But in the long run, growth stops. Without new attempts, there's no new learning.
The same applies at the organizational level. In cultures that hide failure, the same mistakes repeat. Team B experiences the exact same failure that Team A had, without knowing about it. Individual failures never become organizational assets, and everyone pays the same tuition separately.
And most importantly, in organizations where failure isn't discussed, success stories aren't trusted either. "Has this person never failed?" becomes a question, and shared success stories feel like edited highlights.
What Only Failure Can Teach
Looking back, I've failed so many times. At the time, I didn't even realize they were failures.
When a project I'd worked on for six months was scrapped right before launch, I thought "the timing just wasn't right." When an architecture I'd pushed confidently required complete redesign after three months, I rationalized it as "requirements changed." I said hurtful things to team members and only realized much later. When a hiring decision went wrong and the whole team suffered, I thought "just bad luck."
Now I see them all as failures. And most of what I truly learned came from there.
When I succeeded, I thought "I knew my judgment was right" and moved on. I didn't deeply analyze why it succeeded. I didn't distinguish whether it was luck, skill, or timing. It worked, so I just thought it worked.
But when I failed, it was different. I had no choice but to think "why didn't it work?" I had to consider where my judgment was wrong, what I missed, what I should do differently next time. In that process, I came to understand more deeply about myself, about work, about people.
Failure teaches humility. You learn through experience that you can be wrong, that your convictions aren't always right. Without this humility, it's hard to accept feedback, and without accepting feedback, growth stops.
Failure builds resilience. Someone who has fallen hard once knows they can get back up when they fall again. Someone who has never fallen crumbles at small failures. Failure muscles can only be built through failure.
What Incident Reports Tell Us
We've had a lot of incidents lately. Honestly, I've written quite a few incident reports.
After 20 years of development, I've learned something. When code production and change volume go up, the probability of incidents increases too. It's obvious. If you don't touch anything, there are no incidents. If you don't release new features, don't improve the system, don't take risks, incidents don't happen.
So having many incidents also means we're trying, building, and creating that much.
Of course, fewer incidents is better. They inconvenience users and stress the team. But I think it's better to try, fail, and learn than to attempt nothing just to avoid incidents.
Every time we write an incident report, we learn. What went wrong, why it happened, how to prevent it next time. As that learning accumulates, our service becomes more robust, and our developers grow directly and indirectly. A developer who has experienced incidents is definitely different from one who hasn't.
There's no need to be ashamed of incident reports. They're actually records showing how much we're trying and how much we're learning in the process.
The Courage to Talk About Failure
Of course, you don't need to publicly share every failure. Failure has context and timing. Bringing it up before the wound heals is hard on yourself too.
But at the very least, I hope you won't be ashamed of failure.
Having failed means you tried. Those who don't try don't even get the chance to fail. Having many failures also means you've challenged yourself that many times.
I sometimes ask in interviews, "What's your biggest failure experience?" Some answer "I've never failed." That might be true. But I worry a little. Did they really never fail, or can they not recognize failure as failure, or do they think admitting failure is disadvantageous?
I actually trust more the person who says "I failed at this, and this is what I learned." It means they can view their experience objectively, and they know how to learn from it.
The Prison of Others' Perceptions
We're more conscious of others' opinions than we think.
"What will they think if I say this?" "What if I get labeled as a failure?" "What if I don't get opportunities later?"
These worries make us quiet. Make us safe. And eventually, make us small.
But honestly, others aren't that interested in our failures. They're busy with their own work. Almost no one remembers the failure we had a year ago. The only one who remembers is ourselves.
Not trying because of others' perceptions, hiding failure, only talking about success. When these things accumulate, we gradually start living a fake version of ourselves. Like an SNS account that only shows edited highlights.
If you're afraid to show the real you, it's worth examining what that fear actually is. Most of the time, it's fear inflated beyond reality.
How to Turn Failure into an Asset
Failure itself isn't an asset. It becomes an asset only when you learn from failure and apply that learning next time.
So when I fail, I ask myself a few things.
What went wrong. Where was my judgment wrong. What would I do differently if the same situation came up. What did I learn from this failure.
If I can answer these questions, that failure has already become an asset. If I can't answer them, I'm likely to repeat the same failure.
And if possible, I share that learning with someone. With juniors, with colleagues, or like this in writing. If my failure can reduce someone else's trial and error, that failure gains greater value.
In the End, Failure is a Byproduct of Trying
It would be nice to succeed without failure, but reality isn't like that.
If you try something new, you might fail. If you challenge a difficult problem, you might fail. If you try to exceed your limits, you might fail. That's normal.
Having no failure means one of two things. Either you're really lucky, or you haven't challenged yourself enough.
I will continue to fail. And I will learn from those failures. That's the surest path to growth I know.
When was your last failure? And what did you learn from it?
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