There are moments where you simply cannot function as a human, never mind a leader, and you need to recognize them and walk out the door. Don’t make a bad decision because you’re frustrated and overworked—get your head on straight and come in fresh the next day.

None of this is revolutionary. You probably learned it in elementary school: write down a list of what you need to do, take a deep breath and some quiet time if you’re upset, eat your vegetables, exercise, sleep. But you’ll forget. We all forget. So grab your calendar and make a plan. You’ll be working all the time for a while. That’s okay. It’s not forever. But you’ve probably been beating at your problems with the same hammer for too long— it’s time for your brain to rummage around and find a crowbar. Or a bulldozer. Give your mind some time to breathe.

Then I made two other mistakes. One was that I didn’t fully appreciate the importance of simply provisioning traditional institutional reassurance. By asking and challenging everything, you create a lot of uncertainty, and that uncertainty can be debilitating to the ongoing functioning of the organization. I failed to appreciate that if you’re going to be questioning everybody and challenging everybody, you have to do a lot of reassuring in return. I didn’t say, ‘Isn’t Harvard great?’ If I had said that, it would have been much more reassuring.” - Lawrence Summers.

As you will learn in this book, how we frame or reframe failure has a great deal to do with our capacity to fail well. Reframing failure is the life-enhancing skill that helps us overcome our spontaneous aversion to failure. It starts with the willingness to look at yourself—not to engage in extensive self-criticism or to enumerate your personal flaws, but to become more aware of universal tendencies that stem from how we’re wired and are compounded by how we’re socialized. This is not about rumination—a repetitive negative thought process that isn’t productive—or self-flagellation. But it may mean taking a look at some of your idiosyncratic habits. Without this, it’s hard to experiment with practices that help us think and act differently.

Note that healthy attributions about failure not only stay balanced and rational, they also take account of the ways—small or large—that you may have contributed to what happened. Maybe you didn’t prepare sufficiently for the interview. This is not to beat yourself up or wallow in shame. Quite the contrary; it’s about developing the self-awareness and confidence to keep learning, making whatever changes you need so as to do better next time. Each of us is a fallible human being, living and working with other fallible human beings. Even if we work to overcome our emotional aversion to failure, failing effectively isn’t automatic. We also need help to reduce the confusion created by the glib talk about failure that is especially rampant in conversations on entrepreneurship.

I’d go so far as to say that insisting on high standards without psychological safety is a recipe for failure—and not the good kind. People are more likely to mess up (even for things they know how to do well) when they’re stressed. Similarly, when you have a question about how to do something but don’t feel able to ask someone, you’re at risk of running headlong into a basic failure. Also, when people encounter intelligent failures, they need to feel safe enough to tell other people about them. These useful failures are no longer “intelligent” when they happen a second time.