Dr. Melisa Buie spent years trying to avoid failure — until she realized the bigger mistake was disappearing after a win and treating rest as the finish line instead of part of the cycle. The author of Faceplant: FREE Yourself from Failure's Funk sha...
Joel Steele built a healthy fast food chain in his early 20s and watched it collapse into roughly $800,000 of debt – the result, he now says, of confusing growth with success. In this conversation, he unpacks the warning signs he refused to see, the...
Irna Hutabarat Athans is an innovation strategist, MIT Sloan grad, author, poet, and former Tango World Championship competitor. Her favorite mistake was walking away from technology entirely because she felt it was soulless and couldn't accommodate...
Andy Freed has spent 30 years helping leaders communicate with clarity — but one cross-cultural marketing blunder taught him that clever means nothing if you haven't considered your audience. The CEO of Virtual Inc. and author of “Lead Like the Boss”...
Dr. Julia Garcia built a performing arts collective before she understood the business model — and later walked away from a tech startup she believed in because her sense of self-worth had quietly collapsed. She shares why hope is a cognitive science...
My guest for Episode #344 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Mike Chaput, President and CEO of Endsight. Mike's favorite mistake was making “have a sense of humor” a core company value — a choice that inadvertently permitted blame-based behaviors,...
Kendall Berg was so good at her job that she thought she didn't have to be nice — until a VP told her, “Nobody likes working with you.” That feedback became the catalyst for five promotions in six years, a coaching business, and a completely differen...
Patrick Engasser spent two years ranked near the bottom of a 615-person sales organization before one decision changed everything: hiring a coach. In this episode, he talks about why waiting so long was his biggest mistake, how he turned blindness in...
Dr. Jen Fry shares how an eight-month silence with her best friend became her favorite mistake — and why conflict avoidance, not conflict itself, is what really damages leadership cultures, teams, and relationships. Listen: Check out all episodes on...
MLB's new Automated Ball-Strike challenge system is designed to reduce bad calls. It may also create a new category of mistakes — ones that didn't exist before the fix. Listen: Check out all episodes on the My Favorite Mistake main page. Baseball has...