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Years ago I shipped something genuinely bad. Missed the brief, late, had to be redone by someone else.
I expected to get pulled aside and quietly sidelined.
I hadn’t thought about it that way.
I’d been so focused on the outcome being bad that I hadn’t looked at the process that produced it which, it turned out, was the actual useful information.
- The outcome tells you what happened once
- The process tells you what will keep happening until you fix it
I got promoted eight months later. Not despite that failure- partly because of what I changed after actually looking at it instead of just feeling bad about it.
Most of us are much better at feeling bad about a mistake than examining it. Feeling bad is free. Examining it is the part that actually changes the next attempt.