A young consultant loses a client after eleven years because she recommended the wrong coverage plan. The following Monday, she sits in the team meeting and waits for the results. What happens instead will have a greater impact on her future than any sales figure.
Monday morning, 8:30, team meeting at a real estate agency I’ve been working with for a year.
A young consultant is sitting across from me, her shoulders slightly hunched forward, her eyes fixed on her notes. On Friday, she recommended an insurance plan to a long-time client that wasn’t a good fit. The client canceled the policy after eleven years.
She’s expecting someone to tell her what she did wrong.
Instead, the team leader asks something else: “What will you take away from this that you’ll do differently in your next interview?”
The counselor looks up, surprised. It is precisely that split second between shame and curiosity that is the focus of this column.
What a single mistake can decide
The question behind this goes beyond this one conversation. Does a setback make us smaller, or, if we process it properly, does it make us greater? And who actually decides that: the system, the team, or something within ourselves?
Stronger Through Challenge
Risk theorist Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined a term for this phenomenon that sounds a bit clunky at first: antifragility. He distinguishes between three states. Fragile is something that breaks under pressure. Robust refers to something that withstands pressure without changing. Antifragile refers to something that becomes stronger as a result of pressure.
A glass is fragile; a fall shatters it. A stone is robust; a fall barely changes it. But a bone, a muscle, and an immune system are antifragile. They need a certain amount of stimulation to grow. Without stress, bones become porous; without friction, a muscle remains weak. In physiology, this effect is called hormesis: a small, controlled amount of stress makes a system more resilient, not weaker.
It works similarly in humans, except that the stimulus isn’t weight or a pathogen, but a setback, criticism, or a lost customer. Whether such a stimulus makes us stronger or weaker isn’t determined by the setback itself. It depends on how we interpret it and what we do afterward.
The formula behind it
This is exactly where what I’ve been teaching sales teams for years comes into play: Performance isn’t additive, it’s multiplicative, resulting from mindset, skills, and routine. Mindset is how you interpret things: Do I see a mistake as a threat or as information? Skills are your ability: Do I know what I can do differently? Routine is repetition: do I practice the new behavior often enough for it to become a habit?
Because these three factors are multiplied, a single zero is enough to neutralize everything. A consultant with outstanding skills and a disciplined routine who interprets every mistake as a personal failure will avoid the next difficult situation instead of learning from it. Mindset times zero equals zero, no matter how strong the other two factors are.
When Errors Disappear
For insurance companies and brokerage firms, this is no trivial matter. The industry thrives on calculating, pooling, and assuming risk. That is precisely what makes it vulnerable to a subtle fallacy: Those who handle risk so carefully on the outside often do the opposite on the inside. Mistakes are not factored in, but rather hidden.
I regularly observe this in teams that are under compliance pressure. A piece of bad advice, an overlooked clause, or a consulting error isn’t discussed internally but is quietly corrected out of fear of consequences. In the short term, this appears professional. In the long term, however, it creates the opposite of security: small mistakes that never come to light accumulate beneath the surface until one of them becomes too big to correct.
Taleb describes this very pattern as “hidden fragility”, systems that buy short-term calm by accumulating long-term instability. An organization that punishes every mistake ultimately gets exactly what it paid for: fewer visible mistakes and less ability to learn.
That little hesitation beforehand
On a personal level, the same pattern seems smaller, but it has the same effect. The cold call you don’t make. The follow-up question you hold back from asking a customer because the answer might be unpleasant. The feedback you don’t seek because you’re afraid of the criticism it might bring.
Each of these small acts of avoidance feels reasonable in the moment; they provide short-term relief from discomfort. But just like a bone that is never put under stress, a skill that is never used loses its strength. Those who never ask for feedback don’t become more confident in dealing with criticism, they become more sensitive. Those who avoid difficult conversations don’t get better at them, they get worse.
My stance on this
I believe that the way a team or an individual deals with mistakes says more about the future than any metric from the current quarter. Not because mistakes are a good thing, but because the response to them shows whether a system can process stimuli or merely blocks them out.
An organization that discusses mistakes openly, without punishing employees for them, builds something over the years that no competitor can replicate: employees who dare to try new things because they know that a setback won’t cost them their job, but will shape their next version of themselves.
Especially now, as artificial intelligence is reshaping entire job roles in the industry, this point is becoming a competitive factor. Economist Richard Baldwin put it this way at the WEF Growth Summit: “It’s not AI that will take your job away. It’s someone who uses AI who will take it away from you.” Those who work with new tools inevitably make more mistakes because they’re trying out more things. It is precisely this process of trial and error trying, failing, and trying again that is no longer a side issue today, but rather the fundamental mindset that determines who will grow alongside this industry and who will be left behind.
What Became of Her
The consultant from the team meeting later told me what she had learned during that conversation with her team leader. Not how to properly develop a coverage plan—she already knew that. But rather, that a mistake doesn’t disqualify her as long as she acknowledges it.
Three weeks later, she landed a new client, one she would never have called before. Being laid off after eleven years didn’t leave her broken or unchanged. It made her stronger.
Marcus Selzer
See also: The Worst Decision of the Day
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