1. Identify and describe a point in your life when you failed. Don’t write about simple or silly mistakes.

The difference between a failure and a mistake is how bad you felt afterwards. A real failure still makes you cringe when you think about it years later. What was the situation? What were your goals? And how did it turn out? There is the greatest practical benefi t of making a few failures early in life.

—T. H. Huxley No one wants to fail.89 Everyone wants to succeed.

Nevertheless, some businesspeople believe that failure can have enormous value. At Microsoft, founder and chairman Bill Gates encourages his managers to hire people who have made mistakes in their jobs or careers.

A Microsoft vice president says, “We look for somebody who learns, adapts, and is active in the process of learning from mistakes. We always ask, what was a major failure you had? What did you learn from it?”

Another reason that failure is viewed positively is that it is often a sign of risk taking and experimentation, both of which are in short supply in many companies.

Harvard Business School professor John Kotter says, “I can imagine a group of executives 20 years ago discussing a candidate for a top job and saying, ‘This guy had a big failure when he was 32.’ Everyone else would say,

‘Yep, yep, that’s a bad sign.’ I can imagine that same group considering a candidate today and saying, ‘What worries me about this guy is that he’s never failed.’ ”