Once failure is treated as a language, the next step is building a routine for interpreting it. That can look like a brief after-action review: What was the goal? What happened? Why did it happen? What will I try next? This mirrors how professionals refine performance—athletes study game tape, scientists record negative results, and entrepreneurs iterate after rejected pitches.
Finally, Malcolm X’s metaphor implies that success isn’t a single moment of victory but the ability to construct outcomes reliably. By collecting lessons from failures and applying them consistently, you don’t just “get lucky”—you learn the grammar well enough to write success on purpose. [...]
