A few days ago I had a great conversation with Emi Kolawole, from The Washington Post, in which we talked about learning from our failures.

I think there can be great value in being humble and learning from our mistakes, in fact there is a lot of power in failure… the power to look for new opportunities, to innovate. We can take advantage of the benefit that failure provides in the process of inspiring new ideas, taking a business in a new direction.

In Latin America, we have experienced a lot of situations that we’ve had to confront and for a long time we have clung to the past. Today we have realized that the past is not an anchor but an inspiration of a new vision for the future. The past should be taken as learning in a creative way, to correct and go beyond our mistakes, opening new paths and expanding our horizons.

For my part, I have learned that patience is very important. To take time into consideration and identify situations that can be improved upon. By this I don’t mean that being impatient is incorrect because impatient people are more likely to innovate, but I think it’s important to be able to realize some situations take extra time to evaluate.

Failure is not always bad; in fact it can be good. We just have to start learning strategies more than superficial lessons and get over The Blame Game, as Amy Edmondson, Professor of Harvard Business School, so aptly says in the article Strategies for Learning from Failure.

Video of my interview in The Washington Post