Failure is The Backbone of Success
Lindsay R. Dodd
02 Jul, 2025
There’s something deliciously ironic about success stories.
We adore them. We applaud them. We plaster them across magazine covers, LinkedIn updates, award dinners, and gala speeches. Yet we conveniently overlook the greasy, cracked, scuffed bootlaces of failure that held up the trousers of those triumphant tales.
Failure, I maintain, is not only the backbone of success — it is success in its larval stage. You don’t get one without the other. And any executive, leader, or entrepreneur who insists otherwise is either lying through gritted teeth or so heavily propped up by a PR team that they could sell sand to a Saudi.
This blog, like most things in life, starts with an uncomfortable truth: we are failing all the time. The difference is whether we’re failing forward or failing backward.
Success Has a Terrible Memory
The problem with success is that it rarely remembers where it came from. Success is like an amnesiac peacock — all feathers, no recollection of how it got out of the mud.
You’ll hear people say things like, “I knew it would work all along,” or “We just had to believe in the vision.” What they won’t tell you — what they can’t, sometimes — is how many nights they spent staring at ceilings, refreshing their bank apps, and second-guessing their very sanity.
Take any breakthrough business idea, personal achievement, or game-changing innovation. Underneath it lies a graveyard of prototypes, dead-ends, embarrassing meetings, near-divorces, and at least one PowerPoint that should never have seen the light of day.
The Illusion of Linear Progress
We love tidy, linear progress: Step 1, then Step 2, and voilà — Step 3, SUCCESS! That’s what MBA programs and strategy decks will have you believe. But success is not linear. It’s lumpy, unpredictable, and full of unpleasant surprises.
A real trajectory looks more like a plate of spaghetti flung across a wall by an angry toddler.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if your road to success doesn’t look like a mess at some point, you’re probably playing it far too safe.
The safest paths often avoid failure. They also avoid real growth.
Boardroom Failures: Where the Carpet Covers the Cracks
Let’s talk boardrooms — the velveted stage of so-called strategic excellence. In those polished temples of quarterly wisdom, no one likes to say the word failure. They prefer euphemisms:
“A learning opportunity.”
“A recalibration of expectations.”
“A non-linear performance period.”
Or my personal favourite: “We missed the mark slightly.”
Translation: It tanked. Spectacularly.
Boards that cannot stomach failure create organisations that stagnate. Cultures that punish risk breed compliance, not creativity. And compliance does not change the game — it just plays the same old tune, one cautious note at a time.
The Real Anatomy of Success
If you were to autopsy success (morbid, I know), you’d find it built of three primary components:
Failure — often repeated and sometimes humiliating.
Adaptation — the act of doing something different because of the failure.
Grit — the refusal to lie down and take failure as final.
You need all three. You cannot skip the first and still claim the third. There are no shortcuts here. Only scars.
My Most Expensive Mistake
It’s only fair that I share one of my own failures — otherwise this blog risks sounding like a lecture from a man who’s never tripped over his own shoelaces.
Years ago, I made the bold (read: naive) decision to branch out and start an advertising company. I had vision, I had ambition, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. That didn’t stop me, of course — hubris rarely waits for expertise.
I believed that if you were clever enough, persuasive enough, and had enough meetings over overpriced coffee, the clients would come, the team would gel, and the work would speak for itself. Turns out, clients don’t just come — they need to be hunted, wooed, serviced, and occasionally psychically managed. Teams don’t gel automatically either — especially when the leader is still working out what kind of company he’s actually running.
We bled time, money, and morale. Good people left. Great ideas never landed. I learned the difference between creativity and commerciality — and how dangerous it is to confuse the two.
The company folded.
But that misadventure taught me more about leadership, client psychology, cashflow, and the brutal clarity of a P&L sheet than any MBA program or glossy success could’ve. It also taught me something else:
Never confuse talent with traction. And never mistake enthusiasm for strategy.
It humbled me. It scarred me. And it made me a better advisor, mentor, and leader.
Failure does that — if you let it.
Why Failure is a Leadership Asset
True leaders don’t just survive failure — they cultivate it.
Let me explain.
The best leaders don’t create cultures of fear where mistakes are hidden under layers of jargon and justifications. Instead, they create environments where intelligent failure is not only accepted but expected.
Google calls them “moonshots.” Elon Musk just blows them up on live television and laughs. Amazon writes them off in letters to shareholders. Real leadership treats failure as feedback.
Here’s what that looks like:
A leader who owns a botched product launch publicly and moves fast to learn.
A CEO who listens to front-line employees when things start to unravel.
A board that doesn’t fire the CMO for a failed campaign — but probes whether the failure came from a bold hypothesis or sloppy execution.
Building a Failure-Tolerant Culture
How do you create an organisation that learns from failure instead of punishing it?
Normalise the Conversation: Talk openly about what didn’t work. Make post-mortems mandatory and honest.
Reward Smart Risks: Promote those who take thoughtful risks, not just those who play it safe.
Measure Learning, Not Just Outcomes: Track experiments, pivots, and iterations — not just revenue and ROI.
Lead with Vulnerability: Share your own failures. Yes, even the ones that still sting. Especially those.
I’ve sat in too many offsites where executives postured about bravery but quivered at the idea of showing weakness. The moment a leader admits to a failure with clarity and confidence, the culture shifts. People breathe. Innovation reawakens.
The Shame Spiral of Perfectionism
One of the most dangerous enemies of success is the obsession with never getting it wrong.
We reward perfectionism in schools. We grade linearly. We promote certainty. Then we dump people into a workplace where uncertainty reigns and expect them to thrive. It's a mismatch that kills creativity.
Perfectionism leads to paralysis. And paralysis leads to irrelevance.
If you wait until your idea, report, product, or strategy is “perfect,” you’ve already missed the window.
I say: ship it, test it, learn from it. Then fix it and go again.
Why Most People Quit Too Soon
Here’s another uncomfortable truth: most people give up when they’re almost there.
There’s a point in every ambitious journey — I call it the “Valley of Oh, Hell No” — where the energy is gone, the morale is dead, and the result seems unreachable. This is where failure does its greatest work.
Push through that, and you’ll find the thin air where real success lives. Quit too soon, and you’ll be one of those bitter barflies who could have been a contender.
From the Ashes of Failure, We Rebuild
What if we stopped treating failure as the opposite of success and started treating it as a co-conspirator?
Think about how children learn to walk. They don’t read manuals. They fall. They get up. They fall again. No toddler internalises the fall as a moral failing. Adults do.
The sooner you can untangle self-worth from outcomes, the faster you grow.
Failure is not personal. It is procedural. It’s a test. It asks, "Are you serious about this?" And if you say yes — truly, deeply yes — then it lets you in. Slowly. Eventually.
Refusing the Failure Narrative
Some failures aren’t about you. They’re structural, circumstantial, or systemic. The market shifted. The wrong investor pulled out. Your timing was just off. Or someone else cheated.
You can do everything right and still fail. That doesn’t make you a failure. That makes you a participant in reality.
But here’s what does make you a failure:
Refusing to learn.
Blaming everyone else.
Quitting too early.
Pretending it didn’t happen.
Becoming bitter instead of better.
Own the narrative, or it owns you.
Redefining Success Altogether
What if success isn’t some trophy to be hoarded, but a cycle — a constant loop of failure, learning, improvement, and reinvention?
In that case, the most successful people are not those who “win” once, but those who continue to experiment. Who never stop taking risks. Who find joy in the attempt.
I’m not advocating for failure for its own sake. Failure without reflection is just bad decision-making. But failure, when framed properly, is the sharpest tool in the leader’s toolkit.
A Word to the Aspiring
If you are sitting on an idea, hesitating to launch, worried you’ll fail: good. You probably will.
Do it anyway.
If you’re licking wounds from a collapse, career setback, or burnt-out venture: good. The worst is over.
Rebuild anyway.
And if you’re successful now — really successful — take a quiet moment to thank the former versions of yourself who failed repeatedly but kept going. They are the real architects of where you are today.
In Conclusion: Fall With Style
Failure is not glamorous. But it is generous. It offers us humility, resilience, insight, and direction.
It clears away the illusion of omnipotence and replaces it with something far more valuable: wisdom.
You cannot talk seriously about success unless you are willing to sit cross-legged at the feet of failure and say, “Teach me.”
So, fall. But fall with style. Fall with grace. And most importantly, fall forward.
Because at the end of the day, success is not the opposite of failure — it is its very backbone.
Dr Lindsay R. Dodd is a boardroom strategist, legal academic, and pragmatic advisor with a fondness for straight talk, self-awareness, and calling things what they are. He specializes in cutting through governance theatre to get to the heart of what drives real organizational impact.