A Template for Failure

Someone once told me that experience is the thing you get right after you needed it.

I’ve been getting experience my whole life.

Here’s what I know how to do: fail in ways that look like trying. Miss the window. Overcommit to the wrong thing. Mistake stubbornness for conviction. Build beautifully toward the wrong destination.

I could teach a masterclass in the gap between effort and outcome.

The honest version of “learn from my mistakes” isn’t instruction. It’s just proof.

Proof that the mistakes don’t end you. That you can be wrong about almost everything and still be standing. That the failure wasn’t the story—it was the tuition.

I don’t know if that’s useful to anyone else. But it’s what I have to offer.

The people who taught me the most weren’t the ones who got it right. They were the ones who got it wrong in ways I recognized.

Not mentors. Witnesses. People who’d already been through the terrain I was entering. Who didn’t say “do this” but “here’s what it looks like when you don’t.”

A broken map is still a map. Sometimes it’s the only honest one.

I used to think I’d eventually arrive somewhere that made the failures make sense. The retrospective narrative where it all added up. The redemption arc.

I don’t think that anymore.

The failures don’t add up. They just accumulate. What changes is your relationship to them. At some point you stop waiting for them to be redeemed and start letting them be useful.

So here’s what I can teach:

Not how to succeed. Not how to avoid the mistakes. Just what it looks like on the other side of them.

The template is broken. That’s the point.

A polished template is a lie someone’s telling you about how clean the path is. A broken one is honest about the terrain.

I’m still here. Still building. Still wrong about things I haven’t discovered yet.

If that’s useful to you, take it.

If not, you’ll have your own failures soon enough. They’ll teach you what I can’t.