Why You Shouldn’t Call a Setback a Failure

Recently I had a conversation that changed how I think about the word failure — with Dean Stott, already live on Business Bourbon and Cigars. He spent sixteen years in UK Special Forces, built a private security company that evacuated embassies out of war zones, and became the first man to cycle the entire Pan-American Highway. We talked about transition, identity, rebuilding from zero more than once. One sentence he said is still stuck in my head: Dean doesn’t use the word failure, he calls it experience.

His logic was simple enough to write on an index card: you can’t be experienced without having some experiences go wrong first, so the wrong-going part isn’t the exception to the story, it’s the tuition. What made it stick for me was the reason he gave for why it matters, which came from a friend of his who studies Special Forces selection.

What Selection Actually Measures

On paper, the candidates who wash out of that selection process aren’t the least capable people in the room. A lot of them are the most capable, by every normal measure anyone would use to rank them beforehand. The washout rate still sits around 95 percent. For years nobody could explain why the paper rankings didn’t predict who made it, until someone finally figured out they’d been testing the wrong thing. They were testing performance under normal conditions. What actually predicts who makes it through is how someone responds in the ninety seconds after something goes sideways. Selection wasn’t measuring skill. It was measuring what a person does with a setback, and that’s a completely different trait than the one everyone assumed they were selecting for.

A Tuesday, Not a Verdict

I’ve run rooms long enough to know this holds up outside a selection course. Every operator I know has priced something wrong, hired the wrong person, read a market signal backwards, or built a plan on an assumption that turned out to be false. None of that is rare enough to deserve a special word. What’s rare, and what actually separates people, is what happens in the window right after — whether the mistake gets named early and fixed cheap, or whether it gets hidden, defended, or repeated because naming it out loud felt like an admission of something worse than the mistake itself.

The Twelve Seconds After

Most owners think the goal is to build a business where fewer things go wrong. That’s not a bad goal, but it’s the wrong first goal, because you cannot engineer your way to zero. What you can engineer is the twelve seconds after something breaks — whether the person closest to the problem believes telling you costs them something, or believes telling you is the fastest way to make the problem smaller. A business where mistakes are expensive to admit and a business where mistakes are forbidden look identical from the parking lot. They run nothing alike from the inside.

A Diagnostic, Not a Description

The test I use now, and it’s held up better than I expected: if something goes wrong once and gets named, worked through, and fixed, I don’t call it anything. It’s just what running a business looks like on the inside. The only time the word failure earns its keep is when the same mistake shows up twice, because that’s not bad luck anymore, that’s a sign nobody actually learned anything the first time. Which means the word isn’t a description of an event. It’s a diagnostic for whether the lesson landed. Did we make this exact mistake before, under this exact set of conditions? If the answer’s no, we’re fine, we’re building. If the answer’s yes, that’s not about the mistake anymore, that’s about whatever conversation didn’t happen after the first one.

The Room Reads You First

I’ve watched this play out on both sides of a room enough times to trust it. The leaders who can’t say the word failure out loud about their own decisions are, almost without exception, running teams that hide problems from them, not because the team is dishonest, but because they’re smart enough to read the room… and the room told them that surfacing a problem early gets you the same response as causing it. I know this because I was that room for longer than I’d like to admit, and I only found out because a few people who’d earned enough trust to say so, eventually did.

The Bar Doesn’t Move

None of this is an argument for lowering the bar. The bar stays exactly where it was! What changes is what you do with the space underneath it — whether a miss gets treated as information you can act on immediately, or as a verdict that gets buried until it’s bigger and more expensive.

Dean’s version of this, from a world where the stakes were considerably higher than anything in a boardroom, was that the traits that actually get someone through Special Forces selection are things like humility and the willingness to be wrong in front of people who are watching closely. Nobody selects for that on paper. You only find out who has it once something breaks.

I built Me Plus Ultra, in part, because I wanted to be in rooms where that trait got tested out loud instead of quietly, among people serious enough to say “here’s where I got it wrong” without performing the humility or hiding the mistake. That’s most of what the retreat in October is actually built around — not a stage full of things that worked, but a room full of operators willing to say what didn’t, early enough for someone else in the room to save themselves the same tuition.

The Only Metric That Matters

I wrote about this in Ascent, before I’d ever met Dean: mistakes surface while they’re still cheap, if the pressure to name them gets applied early enough. Wait, and the same mistake gets heavier every month it sits there. That’s the actual game. Not whether something goes wrong — it will — but whether it costs an afternoon to fix or a quarter.

Scott Joseph is the founder of Me Plus Ultra, a private leadership community for entrepreneurs and executives navigating complexity, scale, and high-stakes decision-making. The group works with founders who are no longer looking for motivation or tactics, but for sharper thinking, better judgment, and environments that demand accountabilit

Scott is the author of ASCENT, a book on how leaders rise by changing the rooms they operate in, and why environment, not effort, ultimately determines growth. Through Me Plus Ultra, he curates disciplined conversations where experienced leaders pressure-test assumptions, challenge one another’s thinking, and leave with clarity they can actually execute.

In addition to leading Me Plus Ultra, Scott has founded and scaled multiple companies, built and exited complex operating businesses, and facilitated thousands of executive-level conversations across industries. His work now focuses on one thing: helping leaders make better decisions when growth makes everything harder, not clearer.