Yesterday I failed the Salesforce Admin Exam. Over the course of the past month, I have been creating videos teaching the different aspects of Salesforce Administration, and I thought I knew Salesforce well enough by now. I was just 1% shy of passing the exam, meaning I would have passed if I had answered just one more question right. I was expecting to be absolutely devastated by this, but I was surprised to find that I was invigorated by my failure. After a brief onset of shock, I realized that this was nothing more than an opportunity to improve, and I was oddly thankful.

I spent a lot of time and effort studying, so of course I would have preferred to pass. Even so, failing this test helped me actualize my understanding of how important failure is.

Failures, setbacks, and rejections are extremely common in everyday life, and are really important for learning how to do anything properly. The actual failure part isn’t as important as the response to it. If every massive failure causes us to break down and quit, then we are never going to truly get better at anything. Failures can be extremely valuable, but only if we use them to motivate ourselves to learn and keep moving forward.

One interesting way to think about the value of failure is through the Japanese art of kintsugi (金継ぎ). There are many slightly different translations for kintsugi, but the most common one is “golden joinery”. Kintsugi is the art of putting something back together with gold, making it more beautiful and more valuable than it was before. This philosophy helps to highlight failures for the value they have in helping us truly succeed, and help to show their nature as a step in the process rather than a permanent deviation from a preset path. This is present even in the kanji used to form the word. The first kanji means gold, but the second one has a few different meanings including patch, continue, and succeed.

Let’s be clear here, I’m not saying go to work tomorrow and intentionally fail at everything for the sake of “learning”. The type of failures that are truly valuable are the ones where you’ve given your all, but you’ve failed anyway. Don’t let that stop you, pick up the pieces and motivate yourself to make something better than you did before. Otherwise you’re never gonna get the gold.