“I wish everything I tried always worked out like it does for you, Jeff.”

I’ve heard this ridiculous statement many times over the past 25 years, and it drives me crazy. Not only is it fundamentally false, but anyone who believes this sentiment is downplaying the pivotal moments that built my character and virtues while illuminating my priorities and faith formation.

Our failures should be some of the most important aspects of our lives. And I know from experience that many of you reading this will run from the word Failure. You will dress it up with a cute acronym or immediately jump to explain the opportunity that comes from failure, and please know that I am with you. I have experienced breakthroughs in my faith, finances, friendships, and more because of my failures. But I won’t change the word or turn it into something else as I reflect on my career and build my “failure resume.”

April 2000 – Election Loss

I lost the race for Student Body President at Texas A&M University, home of the largest student body elections in the nation. My campaign staff had amassed a volunteer army with several hundred members, and many groups, including the school newspaper, endorsed me. When I entered the Academic Plaza for the election results, I did not have Plan B. Alas, I came up short. Many great lessons came from that experience, and the student body selected an amazing president, Forrest Lane. I was proud of the way our team handled themselves before and after the results, always going the extra mile to encounter others even when they worked for our competitors.

With the loss, I was suddenly free to work on other challenges, and only 6 months later, I appeared in a series of commercials on MTV. Talk about an unexpected twist.

February 2003 – Concentration Risk

Riding the success of our student-run safe-ride program CARPOOL, my friends and I created a Spring Break program to reduce drunk driving at a popular spring break beach destination. We named the new nonprofit Closing Time Inc. We secured agreements for services with the rental car company, a hotel for housing our team, a cell phone provider, most of the local bars, and then began training our 150 volunteers. We also received the promise of funding from a Fortune 100 company that wanted to be associated with our program’s success, which gave us the peace of mind to focus only on the operations, not the finances.

But as public markets go, that company experienced its first losing quarter in over eight years and had to slash budgets, including the funding earmarked for us. I had nothing to fall back on without a signed contract, and time was running out. In sadness, we closed the doors before we ever officially started. Not only was this a tough lesson in concentration risk, but it also taught me that no sale is “final” until it is final. Since then, I have managed hundreds of salespeople, most of whom claim that deals in their pipeline are guaranteed to close with a 100% chance of success… And then life happens, and many of these deals NEVER become clients. I am so grateful I learned these lessons during my second senior year of college.

January 2008 – Turning a Blind Eye

My career in deregulated energy was in full stride when I had to face one of the biggest failures of my career - a mistake that ultimately cost our company hundreds of thousands of dollars. Still, a part of the story hurt much worse than financial loss. Among the teams I managed was our third-party sales channel, a group that interacted with energy brokers in hopes of winning the client contracts that they represented.

Many brokers were good people doing their best to sell contracts and serve client needs. Others, however, had figured out how to cheat the system, deceive clients, and trick the energy providers like us. In one instance, we started working with a broker that called into Texas accounts from out-of-state and sold primarily to small and medium-sized businesses. This new group was prolific, to say the least. As their sales with our company continued to increase, so did the complaints. If we heard an issue about the same salesperson on their side more than once, we would address it with their president, and he would promptly fire that person. This happened repeatedly to the point where we all knew something was off, but the sales made us look good, and we “needed” the momentum.

Then, amid a winter storm in Texas, the official complaints started to flood our inboxes, and it became clear that we needed to investigate further. The customer complaints shared similar patterns of aggressive selling, slick promises, deceitful tactics, and flat-out lies. Another revelation came to light as we listened to recorded calls, reviewed emails, and compared many other documents. No one had ever been fired from this company. Their salespeople simply adopted new names, set up new email addresses, and sometimes changed cell phone numbers. The same salespeople had continued to use the same shady practices for more than half a year before we figured it all out.

In hindsight, we could see the writing on the wall and had to ask ourselves – Did we know that this was happening all along but turned a blind eye, hoping it wasn’t true? Likely. That is why I see this failure as one of my biggest – I let my leadership and my team’s integrity enter the murky middle between being proactive and operating with the highest integrity versus allowing the ends to justify the means. What lesson came of this? Never again did I allow the allure of sales success get in the way of virtuous leadership, even when we had to terminate contracts with other prolific energy brokers.

While there are many more lines to share in my Failure Resume, I pause here and can see clearly how God used these disappointments to form me. Through my failures, I became an expert in human motivation and culture building. I gained a deeper understanding of the meaning of work and the need for human flourishing in our organizations.

What failures have you experienced? Do they continue to weigh you down, or are you ready to turn them into fuel for the engine and put those lessons to work?