Module overview
Turn lived experience into lessons learned, recovery, self-story revision, and next-season planning.
Lessons
Learn From Experience
Every night at dinner, Sara Blakely's father asked her and her brother the same question: 'What did you fail at today?' If they had nothing to report, he was disappointed. If they had a good failure story, he celebrated. That single question reframed failure as evidence of trying, and it shaped Sara into the youngest self-made female billionaire in history when she founded Spanx at 27. In this lesson you will learn to turn raw events into reflections, extract specific learning from experience, review your own recent experiences honestly, and write a lessons-learned memo you can carry forward.
Failure, Feedback, And Recovery
In 1995, J.K. Rowling was a single mother on benefits in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her marriage had failed, she was clinically depressed, and twelve publishers had rejected the manuscript of Harry Potter. Seven years later she was one of the most successful authors in history. In 2008 she gave a Harvard commencement speech called The Fringe Benefits of Failure that explained exactly what her lowest point had taught her. In this lesson you will learn to see failure as feedback, understand how recovery actually works, rewrite a setback as a chapter in a larger story, and build a recovery plan you can use when the next failure arrives.
Update Your Self-Story
After being shot by the Taliban at age 15 for going to school, Malala Yousafzai could have become 'the girl who was shot'. Instead she chose to become 'the girl who fights for education'. She won the Nobel Peace Prize at 17, the youngest person ever to receive it. The difference was not what happened to her. It was the story she chose to tell about herself afterwards. In this lesson you will learn how the story you tell yourself about who you are shapes what you believe is possible, how to check whether the story is based on evidence or on old assumptions, how to rewrite the story with updated evidence, and how to draft a new identity statement that fits who you are now rather than who you used to be.
Revisit And Revise Your Compass
In June 2005, Steve Jobs stood in front of the graduating class at Stanford University and told them to trust that the dots would connect looking backwards, even when they made no sense going forwards. He had been fired from the company he founded at 30, and in the decade that followed, the firing turned out to be the most important thing that ever happened to him. In this lesson you will look back on your own learning journey, notice what has changed in you, realign your internal compass based on current evidence, and write a next-season plan for the person you are becoming.