The Importance of Failure

It’s March, and as we close in on the end of Q1 in 2025, I can’t help but think about 2024. It may sound odd because it’s not the end of December or the beginning of January. Regardless, I’ve been reflecting on the last year a lot lately. Personally, I’ve had a huge amount of shortcomings and failures over the last year (rather, ones that have been exposed over the last year). Professionally, I’ve joined a new team at Brotherhood, and our team has had some spectacular failures in the last few months (and we’ve had wins, too!).

As I reflect on these experiences, I realize the highlights of my personal life and the successes we’ve had as a team didn’t teach me nearly as much as I’ve learned from my failures.

I recently wrote about using custom RSpec matchers and I detailed a recent production failure my team experienced. As a result of that failure, we learned a lot about databases and we are implementing some pretty significant changes to our processes and procedures. While we had outages in the past, we understood this one differently and have taken more steps to mitigate future problems before they become really big issues. Would we have learned or changed if everything “just worked?” No. You can tell because we hadn’t learned it yet, even though we have deployed hundreds (probably thousands) of changes before this one.

Ultimately, I think it’s really important that we learn from our failures.

Yes, it’s hard to fail.

It is hard to lose.

But we get back up.

We go again.

And that is how we get better. One step at a time. Just like when you learned to walk, talk, eat, or do anything, really. As the great philosopher Chumbawamba said, “I get knocked down, but I get up again.”

That is how we grow and improve.

What do you need to pick yourself up from? What risks do you need to take? How can you help someone else who got knocked down get back up?

Published March 7, 2025 by Toby Chin