Almost all the good writers tell us that failure is inevitable and a key learning moment. One says that success has very little to teach us, and failure makes us mature. Another admonishes us to fail forward, others remind us how deeply we are loved even in the midst of failure.

Yadda yadda yadda.

Of course it’s all true and profound. And probably more important than anything I have to say. All I really want to note here is that failure sucks. It hurts inside, and sometimes it even hurts other people. It can make us question our own significance and worth, it leaves us disoriented and unsuree of the next move.

I will leave it to our wiser sages to teach us how to learn from failure. Here, I’d like to help you survive it. Because if failure overwhelms us, beats us, takes us out of the game altogether, we don’t have a chance to learn anything from it. I’ve said before that one of the central lessons for young leaders is simply, “don’t quit.”

So how do we survive failure? A few thoughts.

First, learn when to declare it. You can declare failure too early out of tiredness and discouragement. You can declare failure too late, and beat a dead horse for months.

Second, articulate clearly how you failed. This often helps us relativize what happened. Say you planned to teach a class for four weeks. You hoped 20 people would show up. But in reality, 6 showed up the first week, and that number decreased each week. How did you fail? Well, you taught a class. Some people came. But not as many as you hoped, and they didn’t stick. Simply articulating that helps you get perspective. You didn’t fail at everything. You simply didn’t get as many epeople as you wanted.

Third, don’t try to feel better, try to do better. The right question to ask about the previous example is “why didn’t many people come?” and ” why didn’t they stay. Could be failure of publicizing, could be lack of interest in the topic, could be that it was a bad time, could be that you’re just a boring teacher. Work on fixing that stuff. Way to much energy gets spent rationalizing and justifying our failure instead of simply trying to do better.

And then, you know learn from your failure, cuz, huh, you know, failure is the best teacher. And stuff.