How Failure Makes Us Better People – ElPropósito7 min de lectura

Want to be a better person and a better professional? Fail. (A personal story)

Photo by David Kovalenko on Unsplash

This may be the second-longest post I’ll ever write. It’s a personal one, about my "failures" and how I’ve learned to live with them. I finished high school in 2000, and back then my head was full of doubts, above all: what am I going to study? I remember being torn between three degrees: Aeronautical Engineering (at the Moscow Institute of Technology), Agro-Industry (at Zamorano, Honduras) and Mechanical Engineering (Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, UVG). I chose the last one.

After three years of every kind of failure and trying to "fit in" with the program, I finally made THE decision. I remember getting my grade in a chemistry course (brutally hard for me back then) and climbing the steps from the cafeteria to the parking lot when a deep feeling swept through my mind and heart: I had to change my life and my career radically.

When I told my parents, I remember vividly the support they gave me and the comforting warmth I felt after standing at the edge of an emotional cliff. Yet despite their unconditional support and the successes that followed, deep down I felt for many years that I had failed and thrown away three whole years. I felt I’d wasted all my parents’ effort to give me an education and lost precious time in my life.

That decision to switch programs set me on a new course and, above all, put me in line with my passions. I went to Zamorano and met wonderful people from all over the world who gave me their friendship and with whom I still share great stories, like any good Zamorano alum. I joined a values-driven system where every student models those values from day one. It’s striking how, at every alumni reunion, those values endure and create a unique bond across generations. Anyone who wants to see a success story in living an organization’s values should visit Zamorano or attend one of those reunions.

One detail I can’t leave out is chemistry. At my first university it was an odyssey. At the second, it became a passion. My thesis was on biodiesel production, with chemistry at its heart. It was a big challenge, especially because I had to understand the chemical reactions behind the biodiesel I’d set out to make. I never imagined I’d learn so much organic chemistry and, above all, shatter the belief that I was bad at it. The key was being immersed in a system I loved, one that fulfilled and energized me every day.

Zamorano opened the door to a world of possibilities. In short, after graduating came very special days of work, more friends and another big decision, an MBA, which also shaped my life and deserves its own post. Even with so many good things happening, the feeling of failure and guilt lingered, until one day I decided I had to close that circle somehow. I enrolled in a master’s in Project Management at UVG. I wanted peace in my heart, I wanted my wife and son to be proud of me and, above all, I wanted to see the satisfaction on my parents’ faces when I received the diploma. To my surprise, I graduated with honors.

Closing that circle has been a powerful symbol in my life, especially given how long it took, about 12 years. It came at a time of great awareness, and I think I now see clearly how I make decisions and how I handle success, failure and learning. Here’s what I’ve found:

• Doing and having vs. being: How many decisions do we make because "it has to be done" or "you have to have it", leaving out who we want to be and whether the decision brings us closer to or further from that? To know who we want to be, we have to allow ourselves to discover our Life Purpose.
• Experimenting: Experiments have a cost, and I think three things matter for experimenting well: being sure of what you’re doing, doing what you love and having a support network. With my first degree I had only one of the three, my family’s support. I wasn’t 100% sure of the decision, and I wasn’t doing something I loved.
• Allowing yourself to fail: We don’t tolerate failure. It’s a natural, ancestral trait. If the hunter came back to the tribe empty-handed, several people went hungry, so he was a failure, doomed to be cast out. Today more than ever, everything has to be perfect, results have to be predictable from the start and decisions have to be right, with no margin for error. Nothing could be further from the reality we live in, where complexity and uncertainty are ingredients in any recipe we try. There will always be a margin of error with room for failure, and we need to be clear about that from the outset.
• Lessons: Success and failure share one, and only one, upside I like to highlight: the lessons. Whether things go well or badly, there’s always something good to take away, and I rely on two core questions. If it went well: how can I do it better? If it went badly: what would I do differently if I could start over?
• Passion: Any path you take should start with a healthy dose of optimism. There may be storms, deserts and every kind of adversity, and there will surely be sunny, green days full of nature too. How do we enjoy the road despite the hardships? With passion for what we do. If I’m about to go overboard in a storm, how do I trust I can swim to shore? How do I know I can jump ship and still survive? By knowing my next move is something I’ll do with passion.
• Effort and perseverance: Three words are key in my life: work, work and work. They come together in a Latin phrase at the gates of my alma mater, Zamorano: Labor omnia vincit, work conquers all. Today, after so many lessons from my hits and misses, what has held constant is my effort and perseverance whenever I commit to a decision.
• Life Purpose: I keep coming back to this resource we all carry within us. Making decisions aligned with our Life Purpose lowers the odds of failure. Still, it’s no guarantee, and failure will always be possible. That’s why I live by the whole process above: Being, Experimenting, Allowing myself to fail, Lessons, Passion, Effort and perseverance, Life Purpose.

To close, and in honor of the saying "you never know where life will take you", many years later life rewarded me with the chance to teach. I now have the joy, good fortune and honor of sharing what I know in the classrooms of the very university where I once had to swing the helm of my life hard around.

What decision could you make today that would change the course of your life forever?

Warm regards and have a great week,

Rodrigo Baccaro

"Every wall is a door." Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some resources:

• What I’m Reading: A great essay I recommend: The Servant Leader.
• What I’m Viewing: The origin of love on Earth with Eduardo Punset. Powerful metaphors for understanding where love comes from and how it began to form at the cellular level when the atmosphere was nothing but gas. I recommend it 200%.
• Excel add-in: SimVoi Monte Carlo Simulation for Excel. An inexpensive, very good add-in for running Monte Carlo simulations in Excel on the Mac.
• How to run a Monte Carlo simulation with the add-in above: this short video walks you through it.

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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