It’s just like how many marketing, sales, and creative teams often don’t talk to engineering. Too many numbers. Too black and white. Too many geeks in one room geeking out.

But I wanted to understand the squishy stuff and the geeky stuff. And I liked all of it. I could also translate back and forth—explain the squish to engineers, translate the 1s and 0s to the creatives. I could synthesize all the pieces and keep the whole company in my head.

I spent nine years at Apple. It’s the place where I finally grew up. I wasn’t just managing a team anymore. I was leading hundreds, thousands of people. It was a profound shift in my career and in who I was. After a decade of failure, I finally made something—actually two things—that people actually wanted. I finally got it right.

But it didn’t feel like success at first. Or even in the end. It was still work, every step of the way.

Makers often focus on the shiny object—the product they’re building—and forget about the rest of the journey until they’re almost ready to deliver it to the customer. But customers see it all, experience it all. They’re the ones taking the journey, step-by-step. And they can easily stumble and fall when a step is missing or misaligned.

Integration is not always a good idea. When a company can buy perfectly good products and services from outside suppliers, it is usually wasteful to go through the expense and trouble of mastering a new set of business operations. However, when the core of a business strategy requires the mutual adjustment of multiple elements, and especially when there is important learning to be captured about interactions across business elements, then it may be vital to own and control these elements of the business mix.

People such as James West and Jennifer Heemstra and Clarence Dennis skillfully applied the lessons they gleaned from painful setbacks as part of building successful and fulfilling lives. But we’re not hardwired to confront failure thoughtfully; we have to learn to do it.