I was recently discussing career and life advancement through entrepreneurship with a friend when he said something that few people say: “I need to get more failures under my belt.”

This statement was born from immediately preceding comments about things we’ve both tried with varying degrees of success, and the things we’ve learned from them. Before discussing any personal application of the phrase, let’s briefly explore its origin. I especially liked this online description: “The literal meaning of having something under your belt is having it in your stomach, but it’s probably more frequently used figuratively, to mean having acquired something, often intellectual.”

We do not normally think of failure as being acquired or intellectual, but if we did we might more readily benefit from it. In a very short series on personal failure, I will discuss scenarios involving; Facebook, Harvard Business School, starting a business in the Ukraine, and a job offer that I received from The New York Times about six months ago. I will also share things that I have heard and thought at a Not For Profit Conference that I’m currently attending in Washington, DC.  

Please stay tuned… If you don’t, it’s cool.. We’ll just consider it a failure on your part.