Melinda French Gates on Learning From Failure

Melinda French Gates was born in Dallas, Texas, to Ray French, an aerospace engineer, and Elaine French, a stay-at-home mom of four. She’s a leading voice for global health and gender equality, and her work has saved lives on a vast scale.

Through decades of philanthropy, she’s helped distribute necessary vaccines throughout the developing world, spearheaded large-scale clean water initiatives, and highlighted ways to lift up women on a global scale.

Failure is falling short of the initial goals you set for yourself. Even the world’s most successful people fail on occasion. In fact, many business leaders will insist their failures are part of what helped them succeed in the long run.

Success takes hard work, and that hard work often requires making mistakes and even starting again from scratch on occasion. Some startups even incentivize trying new things with the high possibility of failure to expedite the innovation process.

Failures can serve as learning strategies—each time you make a mistake, you also learn how and why things went wrong. Each failure presents you with an opportunity to grow, enabling you to channel even your defeats into successes.

When you experience failure, treating it as a learning opportunity allows you to better yourself as you regather and try again. Even major failures can serve as stepping stones to bold achievements beyond your initial imaginings.

As you learn from your failures, you make a proactive attempt to turn each move you make throughout your personal and professional development into a step forward. Each so-called mistake is simply a lesson from which you can learn to better calibrate how to achieve what you desire.

Failure is inevitable, but learning from it is a choice. Keep these tips from philanthropist Melinda French Gates in mind as you make an effort to learn from failure:

• Accept that failure can hurt. Even if you know you’ll learn from a personal failure, it’s still going to hurt in the moment. “Don't try to resist and say, ‘Oh, it was okay,’ and put a glossy view on it and move on,” Melinda says. “No, realize that this is hard.” Just remember failure isn’t an innately bad thing, even if it wounds your pride or disappoints you.
• Be flexible. Every misstep you make is a new opportunity to correct your course. “Please be flexible,” Melinda insists. “You've got to be flexible if you're going to effect the change that you want because you're going to learn things. People are going to show up.” As you make mistakes, use them as learning opportunities to take new approaches you wouldn’t have otherwise.
• Expect failure. Incorporate potential failure into your thought process each time you begin a new project. “You're going to fail somewhere and at some time,” Melinda says. “So just expect it, and get a little comfortable being uncomfortable because the failures are the things that you learn from.” You’ll inevitably meet roadblocks, but it’s up to you what you do with them.
• Remain open. Adopt a growth mindset by staying open to the important lessons failure can teach you. “Even if I fail at something or I didn't get through to that senator or he or she has a different point of view than I do,” says Melinda, “I still learned something. And I learned it in a deeper way than I knew it before.” Each mistake is a new learning experience you can use to better yourself so long as you remain open to it.
• Stay confident. Your past failures don’t dictate future ones—each step you take is different from the last. “You may take criticisms or you may have setbacks or disappointments,” Melinda says. “But you're in the arena trying to affect change.” So long as you remain dedicated and your heart is in the right place, stay confident in your efforts to better the world until you reach the end of the road.
• Treat failure as a chance to connect. The fear of failure is common because people don’t want to feel vulnerable—but vulnerability is what enables human beings to connect in the first place. “Connecting on a deeply human level with somebody makes an enormous difference in their life and also in my life,” Melinda says. Use failure as an opportunity to bond with team members in your work environment, and you’ll all be stronger for the next push toward success.

You don’t need a big platform to make a difference. Gain access to the MasterClass Annual Membership for exclusive lessons from Melinda French Gates and learn how your small actions can help build a movement.