In episode 70 of the Potential Leader Lab Podcast, I offer you a call to action to embrace your failures gloriously, learn from them, evolve, and chase the relentless pursuit of self-improvement.

🤔 Our Discussion 🤔

The truth is, we've been programmed to view failure as a roadblock rather than a learning experience—a viewpoint that's not only flawed but also hindering our potential to grow and improve. In exploring the concept of failure, I share that I, too, have experienced more failures than successes. Public failures are just the tip of the iceberg compared to the less visible, private ones where we fail to meet our self-set expectations.

★ Key Moments ★

00:33 Embracing Failure: A Private Struggle

06:10 Success Through Constant Failure

08:13 Redefining Failure and Success

12:49 Embrace Failure for Growth

16:15 Learning from Nonfatal Failures

18:10 Embracing Struggle for Growth

20:55 Opportunity and Resilience Reflection

24:06 Embrace Failure, Evolve, Repeat

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Perry Maughmer believes the world deserves better leadership; that in every human interaction there is the opportunity to either build others up or tear them down; and that leadership is the choice we make in those moments.

These beliefs led Perry to create the Potential Leader Lab. He wanted to offer those who share his beliefs the space and safety to explore transformative ideas, experiment with new behaviors, and evolve into the leaders they were meant to be and that the world needs.

This is a framework he has used again and again with his Vistage peer advisory groups and companies like Turn-Key Tunneling, Convergint, Haughn &  Associates, I Am Boundless, Ketchum & Walton, LSP Technologies, and Ahlum & Arbor.

Perry lives and works on the shores of Buckeye Lake in Ohio, in the mountains of northwest Georgia, and on the beach in Anna Maria, Florida with his amazingly creative wife Lisa. They have 2 rescue dogs and are intermittently visited by their 3 wonderful children throughout the year. Perry & Lisa are living life in crescendo and focused on exploring, experimenting, and evolving their vision of a life they have no desire to retire from.

Copyright 2025 Perry Maughmer

Welcome to The Potential Leader Lab. I'm your host, Perry Maughmer. And today on episode 70, we're gonna talk about well, actually, I'll just give you the title. I fail often and gloriously. That's That's what we're gonna talk about today. So we're gonna talk about the brutal truth of failure. I fail a lot as the title said. Fail a lot.

More than anybody sees, I feel I and like all of us, I fail in public. I I fail far more in private. And what I mean by that is, on I don't share all the expectations I have with everything that I do, but oftentimes, I'm failing to live up to my own expectations of either behavior or performance or whatever I'm doing. So I think for all of us, our public failure failures are a small percentage of our actual fail actual failures because I think we all fail, to live up to things that we've said we wanted to do for ourselves that many, many people don't see, which is okay too. But I fail more often than I succeed, and I think if you're honest, so do you. The the problem is, as a society, we've been conditioned to fear failure, avoid it, or worse yet, pretend it doesn't happen. And the challenge is is, for most of us, you know, if we're working for a living and wanna get better at something, we don't get the chance to practice very infrequently. You know, we we have to fail.

We have to learn as we go. We have to learn in real time. We have to apply new behaviors in real time, and that's a that's a very scary thing. This is a great learning environment, but it's a scary thing. And so what happens is language, you know, as you know, I believe language matters. And and so we try to back off. We try to negate the impact. We don't say I failed.

We say, oh, I screwed up. I fell short. I didn't quite make it. And we soften that word because what we fear is the weight. We fear the weight of failing. But here's the thing. Failure is not the enemy. Avoiding it is because this our world does not celebrate failure.

It rewards the illusion of constant success. We award the illusion of constant success. And what I mean by that is take a look at the world. Take a look at social media. What do you see? You see everybody's curated life on there that is all of their wonder and magic and success and living their best life and all that stuff. So we have emboldened ourselves and know those around us to think that's reality. It's not reality. That's the illusion of constant success.

Nobody lives like that. But real growth, real mastery comes from falling on your face and getting up again. There's an old adage that says fall down six times, get up seven. That's that's life. Like, it life is not fun. Life is not sunshine and rainbows. Life is tough. Life is hard.

There's this great book, called Life is Hard, and it should be because anything meaningful in life is. Any any meaningful thing you're gonna do is hard, requires effort. But I want you to I want you to if you got a pencil, if you're not driving, if you got a mark if you got something or, you know, clip this or whatever, failure is not a detour. It is the path. It is the only path. Failure is not a detour. It's the only path. It's the path to growth.

If it's the path to learning. It's the path to sustainable and scalable success. It is the path. Now here's why we we fear failure. Well, one is societal programming. We're programmed from a very early age to fear failure because the education system It drills into us things like get it right or you're wrong, fail when you're behind, struggle means you're not smart. So from a very young age, we're taught to fear mistakes instead of learning from them because it doesn't feel good to fail. When you get when you get graded, it doesn't feel good.

I mean, let's let to a certain extent, in in our school system, any any most of them, I'm gonna say all of them, but my experience in them is grades replace growth. We're not really looking for growth. I mean, even now, we're looking for test scores. We're not looking for genuine growth. We're not looking to build capacity. We're looking for test scores. So straight a's don't mean that you understand. It means you mastered the game of school.

That's what I was really good at as a kid. I was good at school. There were expectations. I knew exactly what to do. I knew if I learned this and put these answers on there, I got this grade. Now I think you could all agree that ain't the way the world works when you get out of school. There's a lot of, ambiguity in the world. So a lot of times, you're not even clear on what what the game is.

You don't know who's keeping score. Keeping score doesn't matter because the scorekeeper decides and changes what scores mean. I'm just using all these metaphors. Right? So it it it we don't prepare people for life. The the system that that's built on rewards perfection, not resilience. The we don't we don't reward grit, and and grit is an unwavering determination and perseverance and passion to pursue long term goals even in the face of challenges and setbacks. That's grit. That could be quite possibly the most important thing we should teach people because we will fall down.

Do we teach people to have the capacity to get back up? Because that system rewards perfection, not resilience. And then then we go to the workplace, and failure becomes dangerous. We take we take this conditioning into adulthood, and then we get these mantras in our head. Don't take risks. Don't challenge the norm. Don't admit when you know when you don't know something because if you the world tells you if you fail, you're weak. That's what the world tells us. If you fail, you're weak because only all the strong people, all the smart people, they're successful.

They don't fail. But the opposite is actually true, and we all know this. This is the most paradoxical thing about this. We all know deep down inside what the truth is, but we buy into the lie. We let the lie run our lives because the most successful, impactful, world changing people are the people who fail constantly because they're pushing that that they're pushing that their knowledge. They're always pushing to the point of failure because a growth mindset requires that we push to failure. Now we're also fighting our biology, to be quite candid with you. So we're fighting we're fighting on all fronts.

And I think they'll and militarily, they'll tell you, don't fight a war on two fronts. We're fighting a war on two fronts. We're fighting we're fighting society. We're fighting programming, and then we're fighting our biology. And we're stuck in the middle. Because your brain there's nothing wrong with your brain, and I and because it's doing exactly as it was designed to do evolutionarily, it's keeping you safe, which is what it was designed to do. It wasn't designed to live in 2025. It it stopped developing depending on what you read twenty to fifty thousand years ago.

So it's it is built to exist in that world, not this one. So there's nothing wrong with it. It's just not serving you. And if you're not aware of that, you're a passenger on the train, not the conductor, because you think you're thinking, but you're not. So our fear of failure is biological. I mean, the the amygdala, it treats social failure like a survival threat because that's the if we go back thirty thousand years, if you failed, you died. If you didn't if you weren't successful in the hunt, if you got cast out of the group, if any of those things, if you guessed wrong on what plant was edible and what wasn't, all of those failures were fatal back then. Far as I know, not fatal now.

I'm not saying nobody's making life or death decisions during the course of the day, but on average, everybody listening to this and me talking about it, we're not facing life and death challenges every day as far as failure goes. We're talking about evolving to the best version of ourselves, which is not life or death, but our our brain and, therefore, our body treat it like that because evolutionarily, rejection meant death. So we avoid failure because it feels like rejection, and rejection equals death. It doesn't, but it feels like that unless we're telling ourselves a different unless we've written a different script for ourselves, unless we define another narrative. Because we have dopamine and cortisol. That's a trap we're stuck in. Success equals dopamine, which is validation, feeling worthy, reward chemical, pursuit chemical. Then we have failure, which gives us cortisol, which is stress and discomfort, and I don't feel like I'm enough and all of those things.

And we become addicted to success because it feels better biologically. And and this just plays out every time. I mean, we're human beings realize real quickly what feels good and what doesn't, and we pursue pleasure and we reject pain. We avoid pain. We we seek pleasure. That's because of these chemicals, because of dopamine and cortisol. Feels good. So we want more of that.

So we don't wanna we our bodies are we're we're fighting our biology. I can't say it enough. We're fighting our brain, and then we're fighting our biology. Now the other part of this is language really does shape our reality. I mean, on, and if you listen to episode 68, which was a couple episodes ago, Mark Panziera and I, Mark from the, he's the CEO Emeritus at the Pacific Institute, we talked about this. Language, our words create our world. So we have to be very selective in the words that we use because the words words color reality. Because there's a big difference between these two statements.

I am a failure versus I experienced a failure. Those have very different meanings and impacts because once I say I am a failure, that is a label. Labels are really hard to change. If I say, I experienced a failure in this instant, that's an experience that we can change. We can't change a label. Labels are hard to change. And we say we and we do the we do a disservice to people because sometimes, unfortunately, when we're young, we get labeled. And those labels stick, and they stick deep down inside of us.

And you because your brains internalize the words you choose. I mean, think about the difference think about the difference in this statement. One comes from a growth mindset, one comes from a fixed mindset. You can pick which one goes where. One is, I can't do this, versus, I haven't figured this out yet. Which one feels better? Now I'm gonna digress for a second because, Brett, my producer, and I were just talking in the break, and sometimes it feels good to wallow. And I agree with you. It does, and we should from time to time.

It's okay. The thing I can't do this. And sometimes it feels good because what what that does is it relieves us of responsibility and accountability for getting it done. Sometimes it just feels good to go. I can't do this. I give up. It feels good because now it's somebody else's problem, not ours. Now what I'll tell you is, again, back to owning something.

If you just own the fact that you wanna wallow, okay. Cool. We all need to do it every now and then. It feels good. I get it. Do it for thirty minutes. Wallow for thirty minutes. Blame the rest of the world for thirty minutes, then get off your ass and do something.

That's the only difference. Just don't wallow indefinitely. Don't don't create don't wallow. Now I've said there were so many times it doesn't make sense anymore. But don't wallow around in this and use it as a a go forward strategy because it's not. It doesn't work. If you speak about failure like a finality, then it is. If failure equates death to you, then that's what it is.

So you will avoid it like the plague. But if it presents opportunity to you, if in your if in your mindset failure is a point of learning, you'll seek it out. So I would suggest that we fail on purpose. And, by the way, failure is how we learn and science backs us up because neuroplasticity proves that mistakes build stronger neural networks. We have science behind this, a functional MRI, PET scans, all that. Growth our growth comes from struggle, not from ease. It comes from discomfort, not comfort. And a growth mindset has five, actually, five and a half components.

One is you believe that your intelligence can expand or develop. Two, you embrace challenges. Three, you will persist in the face of setbacks. Four, you see effort as a path to mastery. You see effort as a path to mastery. And five, you learn from criticism. And then five and a half is you actually find inspiration in the success of others. Now, I struggle myself with a couple of those.

Number five, learning from criticism. Not great with that one. Now I let me rephrase. I do learn from criticism. I just don't like it. I just don't like getting it in the moment. You know? We have a meeting, and I ask everybody on a scale of one to seven. I just started this this month on a scale of one to seven, and there's very specific, you know, descriptions of one through seven.

How do you rate the meeting? And I just sit there on pins and needles wait. And I ask them. I don't ask them to write it down. I ask them to say it out loud. And so they go around the room, and anybody who doesn't say six or seven, I get itchy. Right? I I'm open to admit in that. I mean, I don't know of anybody who's like, that's awesome. I love getting a two out of seven.

I don't think anybody likes it in the moment. We do we do seek it out, and we like it because it will help us get better, but it doesn't feel good in the moment to say, yeah. You're you're pretty shitty. Like, what you did today sucked. It happens to all of us, and it's it's unrealistic not to expect it, but it still doesn't make it feel better. So, anyway, here's the here's kind of the the the e three approach to leaning into failure, the explore, experiment, evolve. So explore. Confront the fear.

Go inside. Figure it out. Why where are you avoiding risk because you fear looking foolish? Ask yourself the question. Go go investigate. Go explore this. And where are you softening your language around failure instead of naming it? Where are you letting yourself off the hook? Now the experiment side is just, you know, fail in small controlled ways. Take small risks. Put yourself in uncomfortable situations deliberately.

Watch how your brain reacts to failure and challenge the response. Talk yourself through it because you have to be on guard against your brain. That's the thing. Your brain's just another organ. You it'll do what you tell it to do, but it's the only one that's gonna fight you the whole way. And it's not it's it's simple, but not easy. It takes a lot of effort. That's why you wanna start small and build on your successes because we if we get if we see success, small successes, then we'll get more dopamine, you know, back to that earlier discussion, more dopamine means more effort.

You know? So you wanna start small because you can't overcome rejection after rejection, failure after failure after failure. Now if you wanna truly then get into the evolved part, it's reflect on your failure without judgment. Because you remember, there's three things we can't do if we're in judgment. We can't we can't love, we can't lead, and we can't learn in judgment. So if we wanna learn, we have to stay out of judgment. We can't beat ourselves up about failing, and and we're miserable, and we're stupid, and we'll never get this, and all those negative things we tell ourselves because in that state, we'll never learn. But if we wanna if we wanna reflect on failures without judgment, then we can ask ourselves, you know, what did I learn? Then how will I adjust? And and when will I how will I try again? Because I gotta get back to it. And that's why I'll I call them nonfatal failures are really important.

We wanna create opportunities for ourselves and those we care deeply about for nonfatal failures because they're the secret to growth. The low risk, high reward learning opportunity. That's what a nonfatal failure is. So make sure that you're creating for yourself those those opportunities for nonfatal failure. And then then change the narrative. There's a lot of power in language. Go back earlier. It's like, you can say instead of saying, I'm no good at this, say say, I'm not good at it yet, or I'll never figure this out.

I haven't figured it out yet. Same message, very different language. So I'm not good at this versus I'm in the process of learning it. So, yeah, both are true, but one feels a lot better than the other. Or I'll never figure this out to, hey, it's all just part of the experiment. That's why I you know, explore, experiment, evolve is really impactful and meaningful because it gives you freedom. It releases pressure and anxiety. Because if I'm looking at everything I'm doing as an experiment, then I know failure's coming, and failure isn't failure.

It's a data point. And data points help me learn. So I only get better the more I experiment. The more I experiment, the more I fail. And then finally, you have to overcome this this myth of finality. You know, Albert Camus said in the myth of Sisyphus, the struggle itself towards the height is enough to fill a man's heart. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart because Sisyphus rolled that rock to the top of the hill, and it was gonna roll down every night. But that struggle to get it up to the top of the hill was enough to fill his heart regardless of whether it came back down or not.

Because you're never finished, you're just evolving. And so the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. So we gotta turn fuel turn failure into fuel. Because resilience isn't about avoiding failure, it's about using it as a tool to get better. If you wanna be relentless, you must become antifragile, and that means you're gonna benefit from shock. Strong you don't wanna be strong. The opposite of fragile. Fragile can't resist shock.

Strong resists shock. Antifragile benefit from shock, like our nervous system or our, I'm sorry, our immune system. Our nervous system does too to a point. But muscles, our muscles get stronger the more they're exposed to shock and stress. Our our immune system gets stronger the more it's the more it's introduced to shock and stress. So we wanna build ourselves to do that same thing because that works, because stress those things are coming whether we like them or not. The the imp those stressors are coming. Shock is coming, whether we wanted to or not.

We cannot we have not, we are not now, and we're never going to be in control of what comes at us through the world. It is unpredictable and uncontrollable. So what we can do is build ourselves into being antifragile so we benefit from those shocks to the system. And we act we we have a principle that we act into being because that rewires your brain. You don't become resilient by thinking about resilience. You can't think your way into a new way of acting. You have to act your way into a new way of being. So we become resilient by acting it out.

We come become resilient by being resilient. The best example and you can actually, I could put it in the show notes or you can just Google it. The the move the movie Evan Almighty with Steve Carell. There's a scene in that where his wife who has left him now because he's building the boat. You know, he's gonna be Noah. He's building a boat. So his wife leaves him, takes the kids. They they're stopping on the way to I think they're going to her mother's house, and they stop at a restaurant.

The kids are off somewhere, and the wife's sitting there pretty dejected and demoralized. And, Morgan Freeman, who plays God, in the show, is her waiter. So he comes up as her server and says, hey. You look kinda down. Can I, you know, what's going on? So she starts talking, and, and his response always stuck with me is just amazing. And I am getting all the way around the barn to why I brought this up for this last point, and it's because, he says and I remember this one. He says, does if we if we pray for patience, does God give us patience, or did he give us the opportunity to be patient? And he said if we the other one was, he says, if we pray for more family time, does he give us more family time, or does he give us more opportunity to be together as a family? That's it. We don't we don't get things because we don't get resilient because we want resilience.

We get resilient by practicing being resilient, by being put in situations where we must be resilient. Those are those are positions of failure. We have to seek out failure to learn how to be resilient, to learn how to get up after we fall down. You don't teach somebody how to ride a bike and protect them from never falling. They have to fall. It's human nature to fall. It's not about falling. It's about getting back up.

It's about having the will to get back up. It's about having the belief and the self efficacy to get back up. Falling's irrelevant. But can you get back up, but you can't learn to get back up if you don't fall? So when you talk about this, language is important. Right? When you fail, your response shapes what happens next. If you say, hey. This is proof that I'm not good enough. I'll never get this, then you retreat into fear.

If you say, this is a data point. I'm gonna learn from this. Now I know what not to do. That's growth and resilience. The way you talk to yourself matters. So here's so we'll close out by talking about the fact that the relentless few don't fear failure. They chase it. And, again, I fail often and gloriously, and that's why I'm better today than yesterday.

And I don't mean better in a sense of comparison. I mean better because I've learned from what I did yesterday, and I'm working on doing it differently tomorrow. The only failure is really not showing up. And if you're failing, that's good because it means you're in the game. The only the only chance you get to fail is if you're in the game. So the question I have for you is what what language will you choose around failure for yourself? Will you let it define you or refine you? Will you let it define you or refine you? And that's all based on the language that you use. So stop hiding from failure. Start using it.

Identify one place in your life where fear of failure is keeping you small and lean into it because you're not small. That's not what you were put here to do. You weren't put here to you weren't put here on this earth to play small. Pay attention to the word you use about yourself and your struggles. Give yourself some grace. Talk to yourself like you would talk to your child. Talk to yourself like you would talk to any loved one. Talk to yourself like you would talk to a friend.

And if you wouldn't use that language with your friend or your family, then don't use it with yourself. Ask yourself, what did I fail at today, and what did I learn? Every day, what went well, what didn't go well, what would I do differently? So fail, learn, evolve, repeat. Most people will run from failure, but the relentless few, they chase it because they know the only real failure is refusing to play the game. So the question is, are you one of the relentless few, or are you still waiting for permission to fail? I will see you next time if you're willing to rise back up. In the meantime, take care of yourself, focus on creating a better world for those that you care deeply about, and be well.