How many times have you failed, truly?

At Stanford’s d-school, I took a course that taught us how to think about failure.

It was the most profound academic experience of my life.

The faculty members had us document every time we’d ever failed. I filled over half my notebook.

The faculty had everyone in the class write down all the times we felt like a failure—academically, professionally, and personally. We traveled down our individual memory lanes, and felt the weight of failed exams and missed deadlines—all the way back to childhood mistakes—together.

For many students, assessing failures meant dealing with intense emotions. Most people prefer to avoid feelings of insufficiency, embarrassment, and rejection.

Seeing all my failures on paper stunned me. I didn’t feel like I had failed so often.

Then our faculty team flipped our thinking:

Failure isn’t what you didn’t accomplish, it’s what you didn’t recover from.

Our definitions of failure often carry much self-inflicted weight. We judge ourselves harshly in light of our collective views of failure in light of society’s expected examples of success.

The faculty asked us to go back through our notebooks and reconsider the failures, now equipped with a new mental model of failure.

As I pored through my notebook, I struggled to find examples of true failure. Every time, my setbacks provided opportunities to gain new perspectives and build greater persistence.

• When my United States visa got denied, I explored other opportunities I wouldn’t have otherwise pursued.
• When my first entrepreneurial endeavor—a community app—fell apart, I pivoted the energy into a solar car project I’ve loved working on.
• When a passion project with healthy snacks hit repeated roadblocks, I found alternative ingredients to accomplish the goal.

Our professors challenged us to look at failures in a way we hadn’t previously considered. Instead of noting all the times we fell flat on our faces, we noticed the ways we got back up.

Setbacks represent failure only if you don’t come back stronger. Coming up against something difficult, failing to meet the challenge, and practicing to overcome the same obstacle when you next encounter it develops deep resilience. With resilience, a setback is an opportunity to take a step back and reevaluate the situation—then push forward.

Here’s my challenge to you: the next time you’ve declared that you failed, reframe the problem statement. Evaluate your tactic. Did that unblock you or open up a new path?

If you can find a way to recover and move forward, you haven’t really failed, have you?