There is an old and very profound expression, which I have invariably found to be true: “You never learn from your successes.”
A lot of wisdom is packed into that deceptively simple sentence. It’s not our successes that help us get better, but our failures.
Case in point: A few weeks ago my colleagues and I gave a demo of some software we are working on. We were really hoping to impress the people we were showing it to. And in my opinion, we fell flat on our faces.
Our demo wasn’t a total failure. Some of it was actually ok. But merely ok wasn’t good enough. Merely ok wasn’t going to cut it.
So for the last few weeks we’ve been working very hard, using that experience as a guide to help us know what not to do. Then today we gave another demo of our software.
And it was awesome — totally, knock out of the ballpark awesome. The best part is, we’re not even done yet. Now that we have momentum, the demo is getting better every day, by leaps and bounds.
That’s the great thing about failure. Any time you hit bottom, you might find an opportunity to bounce.