Forget morning habits. Failure teaches better lessons
January should be renamed to Planuary but…
Are we hurting our chances by mining someone else’s success and their morning habits, but refusing to learn from what didn’t work for us personally and professionally?
The refreshment that is bubbling enthusiasm is attractive, seductive, delightful.
But I wonder if the crockpot of 2026 plans and ideas is missing a vital ingredient of success: an understanding (and a comfortability) with the failures, near misses, mistakes, and scrapes & bumps that defined 2025?
Out come the articles about setting yourself up for a successful morning routine. Another course or roadmap or podcast from someone successful on all we need to know.
We reach for someone else’s life, someone else’s insights, to guide us.
Which is fine…
If we didn’t ignore a plentiful pile of personal and professional experiences, custom-fit to us, that eliminates the guesswork through data forged in our unique alchemy of variables.
We want to dissect some stranger’s success or adopt their template formula. Yet, we cower away from the teaching ground that is failure.
Why? Isn’t the best way to not repeat mistakes to learn from them?
Think of it this way:
You can study the way someone else succeeded. But you’ll never be able to replicate the magic of their personality, the world’s readiness for their work, the time they made it big, what was new and exciting about their approach, or the context their audience lived in.
Once an idea is out there, let alone successful, the environment has shifted immeasurably.
But you can study what was lacking from your last attempt based on the magic (or limits) of your personality, what worked and what didn’t, with the intimate knowledge of your audience, and a practical guide the time it took you to do things and what resources you needed, with a better understanding of timing, constraints, and context.
Even if the idea is different, you know yourself better by everything you’ve been through. It’s not guesswork. You know what happened, who was there, where your motivations fell short, and how that influenced the activation.
Why ignore a rich learning opportunity?
Every missed shot, every not-quite experience, it is a tailored-to-you magical little experiment.
It’s in the drafts and attempts you can revise to strengthen the work. It’s the insight you gain seeing your hypothesis filtered through actual market’s feedback. And it’s the chance to greet whatever you thought worked that didn’t – or didn’t the way you planned it – with curiosity and refocussed awareness and humility.
Fearing failure is failure twice over.
Instead, face what you need by asking questions like these:
- Is this a failure or an opportunity for revision, refactoring, and relaunching?
- Were there warning signs and/or advice I ignored that would have benefited the project had I listened? What were they?
- Why did I overinvest in my ideas in the moment?
- What can I do differently next time?
- Looking at what I assumed against what took place, what is the difference?
- What exists within the difference that I can learn from?
- How much influence did the variables I cannot control have on this project?
- How do I reduce the risk ratio of that situation in future?
- What lessons and learnings are salvageable from this project?
- How will my last experience benefit the next opportunity in front of me?