Failure on Patrol: How Mistakes Don’t Define Us but Inform Growth

July 29, 2025

by Stephen T. Messenger

We all experience failure. What matters is not that we failed, but how we recover and learn from our experiences. We must learn to treat failure not as a defining moment, but as one step in a long arc of growth.

I recall being a young infantry platoon leader at the tip of the spear for a battalion attack on a small town. In this exercise in the dark forest of Fort Bragg, a few key leaders and I conducted a recon at 0200 to scout out possible avenues of approach.

Seeing the buildings ahead in the shadows, we slowly snuck forward doing our utmost to avoid detection. That’s when it happened. My foot snagged a tripwire, launching a flare straight up and illuminating our position. It was bright as day, and I was the reason we gave away our location.

My heart sank. I felt terrible. I knew I was the reason we’d all be killed in this exercise. But, in this failure, I experienced one of my most powerful lessons as an infantry officer about stealth and used it in the future to become a much better leader.

No One Is Immune

My story is just one example, but even history’s greatest leaders have faced moments of failure. As told by Mike Posey a few weeks ago in The Maximum Standard article, Forged in Failure, American legends from George Washington to Michael Jordan struggled and learned from their shortcoming. History is full of examples of our greatest heroes, from presidents to athletes to experts, facing failure before finding success.

John Maxwell, a renowned leadership expert, tells of when he launched a church in the early 1970s. He was forced to step down after seeing no growth, yet this experience shaped his future success.

Another highly admired leadership author Stephen Covey, best known for writing The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, published a similar book 19 years before Habits was published. Although Spiritual Roots of Human Behavior had many of the same concepts, it never took off and was considered a failure. But it did help him launch his future writing career.

Disappointment is part of life, but often we can only see it from our current lens of struggle. A better way of looking at our shortcomings is to use a longer view of time.

Plan, Absorb, Recover, Adapt

Igor Linkov, an expert in risk prevention, talks about resilience from an organizational perspective that can also be used in our own lives. He states that resilience is the four-step process of making and following a plan, absorbing inevitable disruption, recovering from that challenge, and adapting to the new knowledge base.

Plan

First, we should all be on a plan. When I asked my dad once if I was on the right track for something, he told me, “It doesn’t matter, as long as you have a plan.” Short-term and long-term planning is essential to achieve goals, stay on track, and advance our agendas with an eye on progress. As the Cheshire Cat said, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”

Before I hit my tripwire in the middle of the night, I was on a great short- and long-term plan. In the moment, it was a recon of the enemy position, and a follow-on attack the next day. Over time, it was becoming a better leader and officer beginning a decades-long military career. I was on a good path and tracking towards my goals.

We all need direction, and a plan that helps us achieve our goals. During this plan, disruption is inevitable, and we should use that as motivation to learn from mistakes and get better over time.

Absorb

Disruption is going to happen. Period. No one has gone through life without failing. Linkov argues that when we encounter disruption, our individual performance is going to drop. We’re going to feel terrible and want to curl up in the fetal position. But no matter how catastrophic the failure was, we have to internalize the situation, take some deep breaths, and stabilize the failure.

For my tripwire, in that moment I was devastated. I potentially gave away our position for a large-scale morning assault. We hit the ground hard and lay there for what seemed like an hour, absorbing the incident. We took stock of our new situation, regulated our emotions, and regained control.

Bad stuff is going to happen to us. Like a prize fighter in boxing, we must absorb the blows of life. Yes, we’re going to feel terrible. We must quickly put that behind us. There are things to do.

Recover

Now that we’re past the initial shock, we must regroup and adjust to the surrounding environment. Conditions have changed. Our job is to adapt to them. We apologize for any incident, conduct damage control, and adjust our plans if needed. Life continues in the face of disaster. So, we have to quickly get our minds right, not just for our sake, but for those around us.

After retreating from the tripwire event, we realized the simulated enemy was expecting us on this route but was sleeping during the flare. We quickly adjusted our plan and conducted a recon along an alternate entry, carefully looking for other early-warning devices. This new route was a better option and the one we used to successfully attack the next morning.

Failure generates behavioral change, and not in a bad way. We often learn the most from our least enjoyable experiences. Embrace the event and learn from what happened.

Adapt

Now that our failure is behind us, it’s time to deeply reflect on what we’ve learned. These incidents should help us become better in the future and be an ever-present reminder in the back of our heads to not make the same mistake. A lesson learned is only learned if we don’t repeat it. Our job is not to have the same incident twice.

As for me, this shaped my thought process across decades of leadership. Tactically, I became far more deliberate with every step, a habit that served me well in a later combat deployment to Afghanistan. But in everyday life, it’s a constant reminder of the tripwires out there that can catch us off guard if we’re not paying attention, and to remain constantly vigilant.

Everyone makes mistakes and that’s okay. But making the same mistake twice when we know better is unacceptable.

Recovering from Disruption

Failure seems devastating in the moment. The world seems like it’s going to end, and there’s no silver lining. However, history has shown that just about every one of our leadership heroes has experienced significant failure, absorbed that blow, recovered from the incident, and went on to be successful.

Failure must be looked at through the lens of history and not in the moment. If we handle it right, those lessons we learn will serve us well throughout a successful lifetime, and we’ll avoid the same tripwires in the future. Our mistakes don’t define us, but when we take the long view, they shape us into the leaders we are meant to become.

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