No one craves failure. And yet failure is such an inherent part of pushing forward to try new things.
There’s a perception that the more experienced one becomes, the fewer mistakes are made. It’s likely that for any discipline or craft or practice, there are a finite number of mistakes that can be made, and that with experience, the practitioner gradually chips away at working through the roster of those errors, and learns from them so they don’t get repeated.
Failure is a spectacular teacher: highly reliable, highly effective, and quite reinforcing of what not to do. So, the more seasoned player, scientist, lawyer, auto mechanic, plumber, painter, artist, etc, the more refined and effective they become. The expert knows how to stay out of the trouble spots. Entrepreneurs know that it’s important to fail fast.
In training programs*, there should be an exceptionally high tolerance of failure.
*with some notable exceptions, such as medicine, civil engineering, and other disciplines where lives are at stake; here, learn from the mistakes of others.
