Anne Morris

How do we treat setbacks as failures?

opportunities to learn instead of the opposite data exercise that you described, which is data that I shouldn't be in this room, I shouldn't be in this job, I don't deserve to be here, which is kind of the default data exercise we're doing.

And then when something goes wrong or when I screw up, as I inevitably do, then it gets filtered through my brain as, see, I told you so, you didn't deserve this position.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think this is where I experienced you and I on being on the other side of this line, if this is a spectrum.

But something, you know, a meeting won't go well or I'm aware of a mistake in a meeting and it will hit me harder than you.

Like, it would never occur to you that it was because you were not supposed to be in a meeting.

That would be such an absurd conclusion to reach.

100%.

I think that's... It's also why I love our dear colleagues Amy Edmondson's work and her recent book, The Right Kind of Wrong.

I think...

you know, directionally, most people have an unhealthy relationship with failure and mistakes.

And so I think this book was such a gift and such a public service.

Such a gift.

And one of the things I love is that she complicated, you know, there are different kinds of mistakes, but we bring the same emotional reaction to even the good mistakes, even the great mistakes that teach us things about ourselves that are on the path to innovation, right?

We need to be out there making a lot of good mistakes in order to make progress as a species, but we have such an aversion to failure that we are getting in our own way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a really cool book.