The Power of Failure



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2 Be a Successful Learner by Learning from Failure

Bill Gates provided a practical perspective on the importance of learning from failure in his book Bill Gates @ the Speed of Thought, “Once you embrace unpleasant news not as negative but as evidence of a need for change, you aren’t defeated by it. You’re learning from it.”⁴, ⁵ He then went on to list many costly Microsoft product failures that provided the learning and opportunity for development of many of Microsoft’s biggest successes, mentioning the following examples:

• Many apparently wasted years working on a failed database called Omega resulted in the development of the most popular desktop database, Microsoft Access.
• Millions of dollars and countless hours ...