Celebrate successes, make failures a success

If you are interested in the process of innovation and creativity, you’ve surely heard these phrases many times: “move fast and break things”, “failure is necessary for innovation”, or, as James Joyce beautifully put it: “Mistakes are the portals of discovery.”

We often have a form of hypocrisy when it comes to failure: we praise its virtues… as long as it’s someone else’s mistakes and not our own. When faced with personal failure, our first instinct is usually to erase any trace of the event and never talk about it again.

And yet, making mistakes really is an incredible way to learn. Experimenting and taking risks is crucial in many fields. If we never fail, it means we’re not taking enough risks (or we’re lying to ourselves). If we fail too often, it means something is off. So how can we succeed at failing?

1. Celebrate to share

One of the key aspects of celebrating is sharing. Whether with family, friends, or colleagues, celebrating success together helps build connection. The joy of success is contagious. We always enjoy someone else’s success, even if we barely know them or played no part in it. What we know less is that celebrating failure also builds connection. Someone who claims they’ve never failed is either lying or an alien. Neither type makes very good friends.

Celebrating also means bringing a sense of fun and lightness into our often overloaded workdays. We rarely take the time to reflect on what we’ve accomplished over the year, the month, or even the week. Let’s create moments to share successes with colleagues or friends. It helps anchor our achievements and keep us positive during tougher times. By celebrating and sharing them, we truly learn from both successes and failures. Sometimes, especially for women, we tend to dismiss success with “I just got lucky.” When sharing our wins, we should also share the 2 or 3 key skills that made them possible. This boosts our self-confidence.

In the same way, when facing failure, we often magnify our own shortcomings: focusing on flaws and gaps. That only creates negativity. Other times, we blame everything on external circumstances: lack of resources, a bad market. These are things we cannot control. Either way, nothing positive comes from failure. But by admitting and sharing mistakes with colleagues or friends, we can gain another perspective.

One of my clients once told me about what he considered his biggest failure. He had started organizing events. His first event went extremely well, with only positive feedback. Feeling confident, he launched a second one. This time, only 4 people showed up… He concluded that his first success was just luck and that he lacked the skills to continue. He thought about quitting altogether. But when I listened carefully, I realized that the second event failed because he hadn’t leveraged his network as effectively as the first time. He organized a third event, corrected that mistake, and once again had great success.

By sharing failures, we can turn them into something positive. External perspectives from friends and colleagues help us see our mistakes more clearly and learn from them. You can even organize Fuckup Nights. The principle: people are invited to share their failures for about ten minutes. Participants can then ask questions, exchange views, and give feedback. This way, everyone extracts value from failure!

2. Accept your failures, and those of others

Accepting our own failures also helps us accept those of our teams. Developing a new product or finding a creative solution requires risk-taking: it might not work. But if we never take risks and keep doing the same things even when they don’t work perfectly, we’ll never transform. That’s why it’s crucial to allow our collaborators to make mistakes.

The Indian company Tata does this by rewarding not only the biggest successes each year but also the best attempts. The team behind a great idea that couldn’t be implemented still receives the “Dare to Try Award.” Its members are congratulated by the CEO with as much recognition as those of the most successful team.

Of course, that doesn’t mean all failures should be accepted and celebrated. As managers, we must distinguish between execution mode and experimentation mode. In execution, failure often comes from not following a process. In experimentation, on the other hand, we’re creating something new. Creativity and risk-taking are required, and even if we fail, we’ve learned and moved forward. At this level, if we never fail, it simply means we’re not taking enough risks! Let’s clearly state whether we expect execution or experimentation—this helps teams understand the acceptable level of risk.

If you have many successes, sharing your failures can be even more powerful. As a manager, if you only share your wins, you may give the impression that you never fail, which could increase your team’s fear of failing. To help them accept their mistakes, share your own! Several brilliant scientists have even chosen to publish a “failure résumé.” They listed all the papers they couldn’t get published, the jobs they didn’t get, etc. Such résumés help normalize failure and make it easier to accept.

3. Observe failures to know yourself better

We all encounter failures due to lack of time or energy. You might miss a client’s call because of an unexpected urgent meeting—or miss the meeting because a project deadline was suddenly moved up. Then you or a loved one might fall ill, forcing you to shift priorities again. These small failures simply highlight the limits of our resources. Every day we make choices between goals and try to do our best with what we have. We could just move on quickly from these small failures. But observing and understanding them helps us better manage our time.

Every six months or every quarter, take time to reflect on what you failed to accomplish. It can be purely professional tasks or personal goals like exercising or going to bed earlier.

If you notice you consistently fail at certain tasks, it may signal lack of motivation or engagement. On the flip side, if you never fail, you might be a bit too much of a perfectionist. Of course, the more time we put into a project, the better the results tend to be. But that also means we have less time left for other things that need attention. Ask colleagues or loved ones for feedback to better manage your priorities. And allow yourself small failures now and then—unforeseen events are always possible!

Paying closer attention to our failures also teaches us more about ourselves. Two of my biggest failures were being fired for the wrong reasons, even though the business was doing well. Both times, it was because of conflict with my manager—I’d been a little too direct about what I thought of them. The first time taught me the importance of office politics and helped me build better relationships with superiors. The second time made me realize I preferred being my own boss. That’s when I founded Be&Lead. Even though these failures were hard to swallow at the time, I managed to take enough distance to understand them,and I’m grateful for them every day since.

Observing our failures also helps us gauge the value we place on something. If we can’t move forward after a failure, maybe we weren’t truly motivated by that goal in the first place. In her first year of medical school, my daughter didn’t rank very well. I wondered if it was really the path she wanted to follow. But that setback only made her more determined, she doubled her efforts and passed the year on her first try!

Even if they’re tough to digest in the moment, let’s regularly revisit our failures. We’ll know ourselves better. We’ll build greater self-confidence. We’ll transform failures into success!