I enjoyed reading Chris Lewicki’s “Failure Story”. In summary: While testing the Spirit Mars rover, Mr. Lewicki ran power into parts he did not intend to. Combined with having disconnected a critical link the telemetry feed, he thought he had electrocuted the rover a month before it was bound for Mars. He did not, and his post is a reflection on the event and the lessons learned.

There are two lessons I see in the post. First, and Mr. Lewicki points this out again and again, we build our success based on failure. We make a lot of mistakes and we have to learn from them or we will stay in failure. “It’s in the valley of failure that we sow the seeds of success,” (Jason Altucher).

Second, and more hidden, is the role that others play in helping us sow those seeds. The project manager (identified as “Pete” but I am not on a first-name basis with him…) said “These tests will continue. And Chris will continue to lead them as we have paid for his education. He’s the last person on Earth who would make this mistake again.” This is a lot of trust and support for Mr. Lewicki. Not forcing him out, but giving space to grow through the challenge.

I have been grateful to others who supported me when I messed things up. Early in my post-grad-school career I accidentally spent half of the remaining project budget on AWS storage (automated process was grabbing backups we didn’t care about…and charging us for the disk space). My project manager, George, gave me time to fix it and kept me on the project. There are many other instances. None are as dramatic as a Mars rover, but they are the instances that have helped me grow and I appreciate the people who facilitated it.