It’s been almost a year since I changed jobs. While I was getting ready to leave my last company, a saying stuck with me: “if it was good, it’s a memory, and if it was bad, it’s experience.” For someone closing a chapter, no consolation felt more accurate.
These days I write it the other way around. If it was good, it’s experience. If it was bad, it’s a memory.
I spent years in startups moving through different roles. There were bad calls and there were moments that happened to land. The painful ones stay in my head longer, and the more they hurt, the longer I chew on them. If I wrote a memoir, ten failure scenes would come first.
Looking back, though, what helped me in the next chapter was the other side.
Years ago I ran a task force to pivot our product into an ad platform. I wrote code until dawn every night, and the platform we built became the company’s main growth engine. For a long time I remembered it as a “hard but good time.” We were lucky, the timing was right, and above all we worked hard with good people.
Luck, timing, and people don’t come back. You can pour in the same effort and the same result won’t follow. Left as a memory, that’s where it ends.
Much later, on a different project, I hit a moment where one scene from those days touched the success of the new one. A decision on some day, a line of code, something a customer said. I pull one of those out and ask it again. Why that order, what was I looking at, what made it possible.
Where I had filed everything under “the good times,” a structure shows through, and the memory is finally rewritten into experience I can grow from.
The failures from those days could be pulled apart the same way. A wrong decision on some day, a signal I missed in a meeting, the reason a customer left. I ask each one again. Why it went that way, what I was missing, what failed to stop it.
No matter how honestly I looked, in my case all that came out was a list of things not to do next time. It kept me from stepping in the same trap twice, but the push forward didn’t come from there. If dissecting a good memory is addition, dissecting a bad one is subtraction.
It’s like the way a developer builds up tests. In the codebases I’ve seen, the happy path test gets written once at the start and rarely touched after that, while every incident adds exception handling, defensive code, and the tests that verify them. But what has to pass in production every day is the happy path. It’s the road users walk every day and the one flow the business runs on, and the product only makes value while that path is alive.
Dissecting the bad is closer to the regression test you add after an incident. Necessary, but on its own it doesn’t move the product forward. Dissecting the good is the happy path test: you have to be able to reproduce that path on purpose before the next chapter can produce the same result.
We keep letting the good scenes slip past. The happy path runs fine, so it needs no attention, and the urgent problems must be on the failure path. That’s an easy thing to believe. So most of the retrospectives I’ve been through piled up lists of things not to do, and the one path that has to pass again was never written down.
Around the same time I read Park So-ryung’s Failure Is Something You Pass Through, which takes apart ten wrong decisions from ten years of running Publy. The courage to pull painful scenes out and look at them like that is rare and worth a lot.
Books like that are why fewer people fall into the same trap. But the work we should do more often sits on the other side. Dissecting ten good scenes with the same depth.
So these days I write it like this. Look at the good and let the bad go. Failure is something you pass through. Success is something you reproduce.
#References
- Failure Is Something You Pass Through, Park So-ryung. Dissects ten wrong decisions from ten years of running Publy.
- Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke. Calls the bias of judging a decision by its outcome “resulting” and handles it with the probabilistic thinking of poker.
- High Output Management, Andy Grove. Explains managerial leverage, spending your time on activities where small inputs amplify into large outputs. Dissecting one successful pattern so you can reproduce it later is the highest-leverage retrospective there is.
- The Score Takes Care of Itself, Bill Walsh. The story of how a Standard of Performance, a manual of what excellence looks like, turned the 49ers into a top franchise. The clearest example of turning a happy path into an institutional asset.