Hi Reader,

I tell my coaching clients to run experiments. Try the thing. Treat the result as data. Pivot and go again.

This week, I sat in my office and quietly wondered whether I actually believed a word of it.

Because I have been running experiments of my own. A few of them, back to back. And more than one has landed with a thud (and not a good thud). On paper, I know that is how this works. In my body, it just felt like failing. Again.

Here is the part I do not say out loud very often. The advice I give most freely is the advice I find hardest to take.

Let me back up.

For 20+ years in corporate life, I always knew what the goal was. Someone named the target. I knew, more or less, what I had to do to hit it. The path was not always easy, but at least it was clear. You could see the shape of the win from where you stood.

Building something of your own is not like that. Neither, honestly, is any real career pivot, corporate or not. There are stretches where you genuinely do not know how to get there. You do not have a plan so much as a hunch. You start with a hypothesis. You start with a question. You try a couple of things, and you wait to see what the world says back.

And when what the world says back is "no," a few times in a row, it is easy to hear it as a verdict on you rather than information about the thing.

This is where I have to go back to the research, because it's kinder and clearer than my brain.

Amy Edmondson (whom I recently met at a conference in Baltimore) has spent her career studying this, and in a 2025 interview about her book Right Kind of Wrong, she lays out four things that make a failure an intelligent one rather than just a loss. It happens in new territory, where there is no recipe to follow. It is in pursuit of a goal you care about. It is built on homework, so it is a genuine hypothesis and not a wild swing. And it is as small as it can be while still teaching you something.

Read that list back, and honestly, it changes everything. Those are not the criteria for a person who is failing. Those are the criteria for a person who is working the frontier. New territory, a goal, a hypothesis, a contained bet. If your recent attempts tick those boxes, you are not doing this badly. You are doing exactly the thing that has no other way through except trying and seeing.

Which brings me to the thing I am actually learning this month, and it is not the part I expected.

I cannot go boom, boom, boom from one experiment straight into the next.

That has been my instinct. Something does not work, so I immediately launch the next thing, partly to learn and partly, if I am honest, to outrun the feeling. But you cannot draw a lesson from an experiment while you are still trying to digest what happened. The reflection is the experiment.

And there is good evidence that the pause is not indulgent. A 2024 study in Simulation in Healthcare tested what happens when people take a deliberate, guided pause to reflect in the middle of demanding work. The people who paused carried a lighter mental load and performed better on the parts that were not right in front of them. The stepping back did not cost them momentum. It brought them clarity (and you know I talk about clarity in my book, Clarity in Chaos: Lead with Purpose in Disruptive Times).

Edmondson says something similar about organizations, and it applies just as well to a single tired founder in her office. You put in place two things: the space to run the experiment, and then, separately, the space to actually learn from it. Otherwise, in her words, you never get your money's worth from what it costs you.

So this is what the space between is for. Not to lick wounds. To ask the only question that turns a bruise into a lesson: what did that actually tell me, and what will I try differently next? You still go back. You still pivot, adjust, and try again. You just do not sprint straight past the only part that makes the failure worth anything.

I am in the garden a lot at this time of year, and it keeps handing me the same lesson. You do not get to yank a seedling upward to hurry it along. You plant, you water, and then there is a stretch where the only work is waiting and watching. The growth is real. It is just happening on a timeline you do not control, in the gap where it looks like nothing is happening at all.

If you are somewhere in that gap right now, questioning whether you are cut out for the uncertain thing you have taken on, I want you to hear this from someone who doubted it herself this past week: the doubt is not evidence that you are failing. It is the weather that comes with new territory. Give yourself a pause, take the learning, and go again.

Two Options for This Week

Option A: Name the experiment. Take one recent thing that did not land the way you hoped. Before you launch the next attempt, write down four lines: What territory was this? What was I actually going for? What was my hypothesis? What did the result tell me? You will often find you ran a smart experiment and collected a real lesson, not a failure.

Option B: Build in the gap. If you have been going boom, boom, boom, put one deliberate pause between your next two experiments. A walk, a night, a single quiet morning. Use it for one question only: what did the last one teach me, and what will I change? Protect that gap the way you would protect the work itself. It is the work.

I am taking Option B into July and giving myself permission to reflect before I reach for the next thing.

Tell me, which one will you take?

-Megan