In a famous Nike advertisement, Michael Jordan, one of the most successful basketball players of his generation, did something unusual. Instead of talking about his victories, he talked about his failures. He recalled the thousands of shots he had missed, the games his team had lost and the occasions when he had been trusted to take the decisive shot and missed. He ended with a line that became famous: “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
The interesting idea here is not that failure eventually leads to success. That has become almost a motivational cliché. Jordan’s story points to something more subtle: success and failure are not necessarily opposites. At a sufficiently high level of ambition, failure becomes part of the process of succeeding.
Consider what it means to be the person asked to take the decisive shot. You are being given that responsibility precisely because people believe you have a good chance of succeeding. But no matter how accomplished you are, you will sometimes miss. The only way to guarantee that you never miss the decisive shot is to make sure you are never the person taking it.
The same pattern appears well beyond sport. The scientist pursuing a difficult discovery will follow hypotheses that lead nowhere. The entrepreneur exploring a new market will make bets that do not work. The investor seeking exceptional returns will make some wrong calls. A leader making consequential decisions with incomplete information will occasionally get them wrong. In each case, the possibility of failure is not an unfortunate interruption to serious achievement. It comes with the territory.
Yet we often judge performance as though success should produce an increasingly clean record. As people become more experienced, we expect fewer mistakes. That is reasonable when the same mistakes are being repeated or when failure comes from carelessness. But there is an important distinction between avoidable failure and the failure that accompanies attempting something difficult, uncertain or new. If we treat both alike, we may inadvertently encourage people to choose situations in which success is almost assured.
This creates an interesting paradox. A person with a nearly perfect record may indeed be exceptionally capable. But the record alone cannot tell us that. We also need to know the difficulty of the problems they chose, the uncertainty they accepted and the consequences they were prepared to own. Sometimes an impressive success rate tells us as much about the shots someone did not take as the ones they did.
Perhaps, then, our relationship with failure needs a little more nuance. The useful question is not whether we failed, nor should failure automatically be celebrated. It is whether the failure came from poor preparation and repeated error, or from stretching beyond what was already known and predictable.
Jordan’s missed shots mattered because he kept earning the right to take consequential ones. Someone who never misses may be extraordinarily good. Or perhaps they are simply not taking enough consequential shots.
