Failure Is Success

I have not been writing in a very long time and the reason is very simple. In April I received indication of a new job opportunity and I was very excited. I simply had my mind focused on pursuing this opportunity and could not focus on anything else.

Since then, this opportunity did not come home. My management decided they could not live without me and kept me in place. At first I was hurt, then angry, then frustrated, and now I am slowly coming back to live trying to look for and create new opportunities.

I am a firm believer that opportunities are actively created. That nothing is left to chance and that you essentially are indeed the architect of your own life.

I also believe that in order to become a good and expert architect of your life you need to venture out and take risks. And this includes that occasionally you will fail. And while failure always hurts and generally feels bad, you need failure to grow.

In all my years of being in operational excellence assignments trying to continuously improve how we all work together at my company, I have experienced a significant amount of failures. And only through these failures have I been able to understand the importance of trying.

The job opportunity was self created. Over the past few years I have established myself as a brand. I wanted to be recognized for my ability to think, brainstorm, plan, organize, and work together with various crossfunctional groups. And I did. I worked together with others more proactively. I put emphasis on “good for company” over “good for myself” or even “good for my group”. I sacrificed vacations, worked late night, was overly responsive, and tried to support activities as necessary in order to serve my brand. I exposed myself. Took risks by initiating 1:1s with Directors. Shared my ideas, my vision, and also delivered to my objectives. I suggested and created an entire new team to serve a newly identified business need and staffed it entirely by myself. This was all hard work. And it was done to show myself as someone who can play in the big league.

It paid off. I was approached in April to see if I wanted to pursue a new job overseas.

And it makes me very happy to think that I can indeed create my own luck and be a master of my fate. As I mentioned above. My boss did not want me to go. He felt I was needed here where I am more. And this was a painful thing to hear. So next time, I will work on a better exit plan and make myself more replaceable. And at least I received a salary increase to compensate for the foregone opportunity.

So, while the outcome was not exactly what I expected, there was at least no negative consequence of taking a risk and exposing yourself. Next time, I might take even more risks.