Making Mistakes
aaronkharris.com
aaronkharris.com
As for people who don't want to talk about failures because it damages their "personal brand..." First, always be careful around people too interested in their "personal brand." You'll sometimes find quite a bit of bullshit, misdirection, and borderline lies coming out of those people's mouths. Not always. But often enough. Second, if you've honestly learned from your experience, there's no need to be shy about talking about it. I mean, I understand not wanting to broadcast failures at the top of your resume, but being able to say something like: "Four years ago I founded a start-up that focussed on building custom public space games for brands -- we failed to land enough clients to survive the long-run, but I learned a tremendous amount about how interactive media can work in public spaces and I have great business contacts in the industry who loved our work despite it being too expensive for them or too difficult to communicate up their corporate ladder." Or whatever. That demonstrates that you failed well and would be a great potential asset at your next job or start-up.
don't think you necessarily learn any more or less from failing than you do from succeeding
You learn by finding that reality doesn't match your model, and exploring the reasons for this. If you expected to succeed, then success won't teach you much. If you "failed" and had to correct 20 times on the way to success, those intermediate failures are where the learning comes from.
"Often, I think people will ask what mistakes you should avoid making. My answer to that question is don’t even bother trying to avoid mistakes because you’re going to make tons of mistakes. The important thing is actually learning quickly from whatever mistakes you make and not giving up... So the biggest mistake is this sort of meta-mistake of letting a mistake demoralize you."
Self Determination Theory (SDT, http://www.selfdeterminationtheory.org/) has a few ideas on how to answer this question. SDT provides some tools to deconstruct the concept of self esteem.
Traditional self perception is mainly concerned with a healthy self esteem. Under this paradigm it is only natural for people to regularly evaluate themselves by looking at past success/failures and by comparing themselves to others.
SDT provides an alternative to the traditional "self as an object" approach with a "self as a process" approach. While someone operating under the "self as an object" approach may ask themselves "Am I a good person? Am I worthy?", under SDT other questions like "Am I making good choices?" are much more important. This allows a person to view their own actions more objectively. Past mistakes are more readily available to be acknowledged and used to inform the future since they do not implicate an individual's self worth.
The book Mindset (http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-How-Fulfil-Your-Potential-eboo...) by Carol Dweck draws on a lot of SDT foundational concepts. The premise of the book explores and contrasts two mindsets: the static mindset and the growth mindset. If someone with the static mindset gets easy A's in school they take it to mean that they are smart. If someone with the growth mindsets get's easy A's it feels like a waste of time because it's not challenging. The author also discusses the benefits of praising a child's effort rather than just telling them how smart they are. It's a huge topic and I'm barely scratching the surface, but I think I've shown the top of this particular rabbit hole.
I still struggle with leveraging my failures constructively, but I have found learning about these concepts has enriched my life and helped me discover a hacker's mindset.
Tilting towards building personal brands is so true, and I can totally relate. Even among friends, within social networks... We are carefully building this image emporium around our story, that it is almost surreal. Ego is a powerful thing, I guess.