My social feeds are full of inspiring memes telling me to embrace failure. Business gurus such as The Diary of a CEO’s Steven Bartlett encourage us to ‘outfail the competition’. Organisational psychologist Adam Grant in his book Hidden Potential says, ‘If you’re not failing, you’re not experimenting enough’.
On paper, of course, I agree with it all. But when I’m in the thick of it, when my gut is churning, my brain is catastrophising, and I want to crawl into a hole and hide, reading this advice makes me want to throw my phone across the room. It’s easy to oversimplify this tension.
Let me give you some of my own examples.
My ‘failed’ experiments
It’s all good to talk about failure in hindsight; it’s much harder to live it in real time. Failure is an important part of learning and an inevitable part of experimentation, but it can feel really bloody hard.
Two failed experiments stand out in my life, leaving a lingering sting of regret. While they’re very different from each other, they have one thing in common. Instead of taking the learnings and adapting, I stopped.
Failure 1: The ‘How She does It’ experiment
On my honeymoon I realised the door to a meaningful, aligned and exciting career as a writer hadn’t actually closed. Starting a blog might scratch the itch I had to learn and write on health and wellbeing. It was the first spark that maybe I could have work that felt aligned with how I wanted to show up in the world.
During my maternity leave with our first little boy, I took my first step. I created a blog called How She Does It. I wrote about navigating the shift out of the professional world to have a child, and the messy, imperfect process of stepping back in again. I interviewed other professional mums about how they made it all work. Every week I posted a meal planner with recipes and a shopping list that people could download by subscribing to my newsletter.
This was 2016, when social media still had organic reach, podcasts weren’t everywhere and working-parent resources were limited. The opportunity was right there. But I talked myself out of it. I told myself the space was saturated. I worried what people would think. Running through my head were thoughts like, “Who am I to do this? I’m not qualified. Is this lame?”
I wasn’t used to putting myself out there. I was still working in medical imaging, and flying comfortably under the radar. While dabbling felt safe, changing didn’t. The bigger my blog got, the smaller I felt. Eventually, the fear won and I quit. It wasn’t the first time.
Learn more in the book The Experiment Mindset by Tamsin Simounds.
Failure 2: The triathlon experiment
About 15 years ago, I decided to train for a triathlon. I approached this how I often do things: make a decision and become obsessed with it. At the time, I wasn’t a fast runner but I at least knew how to run. I had never cycled, and I could swim well enough to keep myself afloat, but that’s where it ended.
For about six months I trained harder than I ever had. I was up at 5am, running to the pool to swim before work, and often training twice per day to fit it all in. At the end of the day, I’d go to bed with a triathlon magazine to learn everything I could — the most efficient swimming technique, the best way to transition from the bike to the run, what food I needed to eat to fuel my body.
The day finally arrived and I felt as prepared as I could be. The triathlon was an afternoon event, which was a shift from my usual morning routine. It was also mid-February, the height of an Australian summer, and the temperature was 38 degrees Celsius. Blisteringly hot. Surrounded by hundreds of other nervous participants, I placed my bike out and laid my gear in order, just as I’d practised. Then, brimming with nerves and excitement, we lined up at the river ready to race.
Even with all of my preparation, I wasn’t ready for what came next. In contrast to the heat of the air, the temperature of the water was freezing cold. It turns out that entering cold water suddenly like this, without doing a little warm-up swim first, triggers a ‘cold shock’ response, causing you to involuntarily gasp and hyperventilate. Your heart rate and blood pressure shoot up, causing panic and a loss of control of your breathing.
On top of this, anyone who has done a triathlon will know the chaos of a swim start. In true rookie style, I didn’t know to start toward the back. I was front and centre, which meant I was getting kicked, swum over and pushed around. I didn’t have the space to catch my breath. It was scary.
I stopped and pulled my head above the water once the crowd started to thin out, utterly panicked. And from that moment I was unable to put my head back under without triggering the panic. I doggy paddled the entire swim leg of the triathlon, with the safety boat alongside me constantly asking me if I wanted to quit. I was too proud and too stubborn, and managed to climb out of the water dead last. Humbling doesn’t even cover it.
I followed the plan and did the prep, and I absolutely tanked on the execution. The worst part of it was that because I was so embarrassed and annoyed with myself, I never tried again. I look back on that, knowing what I know now, and kick myself. I was so fit, and I was ready to show myself what I could do.
Rather than taking the really solid learnings about swim starts and trying again, however, I quit. I took what was really just a data point, and turned it into a full stop.
Ask yourself: What did I learn?
The only way you truly fail at an experiment is that you stop learning. These two experiments stand out not because they were my biggest failures —far from it —but because they’re the ones where I abandoned the process. I didn’t reflect and I didn’t iterate. Instead, I pulled the pin the moment things felt too confronting. That instinct to retreat instead of learn is something I’ve changed.
Now, when something doesn’t go to plan, I’m less interested in asking, “Did I fail?” and more interested in asking, “What did this teach me?” That small shift in perspective has made all the difference. It’s helped me see that progress rarely comes from getting everything right the first time. It comes from being willing to test an idea, gather the evidence, make adjustments and try again.
Every experiment, regardless of the outcome, offers information you didn’t have before. And over time, those lessons compound into something far more valuable than avoiding failure ever could: the confidence to keep showing up, stay curious and trust that growth is built through iteration, not perfection.
