Throughout my undergrad and postgrad, I’ve had way more failures than successes. Some of them were so devastating that I thought my life was over — a complete darkness, like a black hole pulling everything in. Strength, air, hope. Everything.
My mom kept telling me: Failure is just an experience. I heard the words, but they didn’t stay with me — not until I’d accumulated enough failures of my own.
Today, I want to share this with you. Failure is just an experience. It is neutral — just like success. You learn from it, you move on, and others won’t really remember.
Charlie Munger spent his career studying failure. While others asked how to succeed, he inverted the question: how do you fail? Avoid that, and you increase your chances. Success follows similar paths, but people fail for different reasons. From this angle, you learn more from failures than successes.
But there is a deeper reason why failure teaches. Some lessons you simply cannot see until you are forced out of the situation. When you are inside it, you are too close — too caught up in the momentum of what you are doing to realize it is not working. You won’t turn back until you hit the wall. You won’t see until it collapses.
And that is exactly where breakthroughs come from. In Chinese, we say: 置之死地而后生 — cornered, with no way out, that is when you find a way to survive. Failure shows you the current path is broken, and forces you to solve problems in ways you would never have tried otherwise.
Failure is an experience you learn from. You learn, and then you move on.
Your life moves on. Things keep happening. The world does not wait for you to process your failure. New challenges come, new problems, new failures. Whether you are ready or not, life keeps going.
Your feelings move on. In the moment, the pain is so strong you are drowning in it. But intensity declines. The drowning becomes a sting, never fully gone but no longer consuming. Maybe one day you suddenly feel the sting late at night — but it won’t last forever.
Your memory moves on. The failure itself doesn’t shrink, but everything around it grows. New memories accumulate, new experiences fill the space. What once consumed your every thought becomes something you carry, then something you occasionally notice, then something that barely registers — a smaller and smaller fraction of what you hold.
Failure is an experience you move on from. But it is not just you who moves on.
The people who love you — they care. Deeply. But no one can ever truly be in your shoes, no matter how much they want to. They haven’t gone through what you have gone through. They haven’t seen what you have seen. And because of that, they won’t feel it as intensely as you do.
The people further from you — they are the leading actors of their own life. You may be a supporting role, or maybe just background — a face that shows up for a glimpse and disappears. They may think about your failure for a moment, then move to their own problems. They have their own failures to deal with, their own darkness to sit with. Your failure simply does not stay with them.
And for anyone still concerned, people’s opinions are not fixed. They are changing, dynamic, constantly being rewritten. Some people update easily. Others are stubborn — it may take more to shift how they see you. But even the most stubborn mind is still changeable. It may require a different level of effort, but it is always doable. You will always have a second chance to change how people see you, through your new decisions and actions.
Today I shared with you that failure is just an experience. An experience you learn from — because failure shows you what you cannot see from the inside, and forces you to find new ways forward. An experience you move on from — because your life keeps going, your feelings fade, and your memory makes room. And an experience that others won’t remember — because no one is truly in your shoes, because their life is busy, and because their opinions are never fixed.
Next time failure strikes you — and it will — remember: it is a passenger passing through your life. Like all passengers, it arrives, it stays for a while, and it leaves. Wave at it. Take what it has to give you. And walk away.
Xinyue Cai
March 29th, 2026
Houston
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