If Young Nonprofit Professionals Want to Lead They Need To Learn To Fail

Failure is a crucial ingredient in every great leader’s recipe for success; unfortunately we live in a society that demonizes failure. It’s viewed as something that only happens to unintelligent, impulsive, and reckless individuals.

Kathryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error states, “We are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition.” Nonetheless this resistance to failure, while affecting individuals in varying ways, ultimately impacts how we make career and leadership decisions.

I explore what this means for millenials in my first piece for OnlyUp, a collaborative, bimonthly online journal about issues facing young adults in the nonprofit sector. Check it out and share your thoughts!