Failing Made me a Better Person

Mark Suster’s blog post today really hit me. It’s a topic I’ve thought a lot about in the past several years — how do you manage to be an entrepreneur and still maintain healthy personal relationships? — and one that I know a bit about.

I, like Brad Feld, was married in my early twenties. Also like Brad, my marriage didn’t last. At the time I was a consultant, and during the three years that my ex and I were married, I was out of town every single week for 4–5 days. In retrospect, I can’t believe that 25-year-old me thought that was anything other than a poor life choice.

But the thing that I really loved about Mark’s post is actually a quote from the book. In it, a woman describes how her life changed after a harrowing accident left several members of her family severely injured:

I appreciate kindness more. I recognize kindness more often. I do stop to smell the roses. I give people a break. I give people the benfit of the doubt.

I ask more questions. I forgive more. I am more open to ideas. I have more faith in mankind. I am more tolerant. I make an effort to understand a situation or what someone is trying to tell me.

I am more more sensitive to others who are in pain. I want less responsibility. I want less materialistically. I enjoy purging and freeing our lives of stuff.

I loved this quote, and I completely identified with it. Getting divorced was the first big failure of my life. Not that everything up to that point had been an incredible triumph, but I had never really screwed the pooch before. Failing big, and failing publicly, taught me a degree of humility that I had just never possessed before.

The changes in my personality and outlook since then have been very similar to the ones described in the quote above. I’m more patient, invest more in people, and put much more effort into listening. I see people. I temper myself more, and am more self aware.

We learn through adversity all the time in our professional lives; it’s wonderful to hear someone talk about it in the context of their personal life. And I think it’s really interesting that whether you’re talking about divorce or close family injury, the thought processes are often the same: slow down, be kind, simplify, and focus on what matters.