One night, while reading through my postgrad assignment,
surrounded by books and highlighted pages,
I came across a business case that stopped me.
An employee at IBM made a mistake that cost the company half a million dollars.
One mistake.
Five hundred thousand dollars.
I expected the story to end with termination.
It didn’t.
Instead, he was kept.
When asked why, Thomas J. Watson Sr. supposedly said:
“We’ve just spent half a million dollars educating him.”
That line stayed with me.
Where most would see a liability,
he saw an investment.
It made me think about how we treat failure.
In school.
At work.
In life.
We are trained to avoid it.
Do not mess up.
Do not embarrass yourself.
Do not fall behind.
So when we fail, we panic.
We hide.
We make excuses.
But failure, when examined, is information.
It shows you what does not work.
It exposes your blind spots.
It forces growth.
What hurts us is not falling.
It is refusing to learn from the fall.
Every mistake has a cost.
So does every lesson.
The difference is whether we waste it.
Right now, I am still learning.
Still making mistakes.
Still getting things wrong.
Still figuring things out.
And maybe that is fine.
As long as I reflect.
As long as I improve.
As long as I do not repeat the same error out of pride.
Failure is not the opposite of success.
It is tuition.
You pay it in humility.
And if you are wise,
you graduate stronger.
Every fall contains a lesson.
The only real loss
is ignoring it.