Personal Growth Hack: How to Get the Most Out of Your Project Shortcomings

Last month, I participated in a logo design competition that I didn’t win. My entitlement hat had it all prepared to make a parade. But since the miserable promoter didn’t win, there is nothing to say and a natural-usual reaction to being silent about what happened.

But let’s consider the complication of looking at what was lost, with the work executed and its lessons learned. We know the good/bad aspects of this. The good is the consideration to reflect on what would be considered noise. The bad is a natural tendency to trash things too fast and not learn.

It makes sense to see the situation as under our control when it’s the case that it is up to us when things are in our control. But the modern world brings another factor present in the accelerated tracks that we might find ourselves.

Consider that logo competition as an example. It had a framework: with dates, with judges, with rules.

As the world becomes transactional, the projects that we engage might fit into a mode of operation-oriented to delivering outcomes. There is a natural expectation that transactional processes have validation systems, naturally creating the bias for disclosing the wins when we make the right moves and ignoring everything when we fail in the critic’s eyes (from the metrics as expected).

In this inductive clock-based sliding device, a pipeline, we are compelled to reduce and hide many things and focus on what is being expected.

It’s a problem with these transactional tracks in the modern world. There is a softer version of the problem and a hard version. The soft is when you can do something about it - when things are in your control as indicated. The hard version happens when the tracks require us to abide by the rules and join the contract. As an example, the contract in the transaction might require confidentiality - it’s biased at the contract level.

Therefore, keep in mind and be aware of the many outputs you might be interested in when executing a project, such as learning outcomes that can come from any execution.

As for my non-winning logo entry, it falls under the soft situation since it’s in my control to look back at it, reflect, and learn.