A leader should be measured not only by successes but also by how quickly he or she can recover from failure. Great leaders are born out of failure. They’ve messed up, made a wrong decision, or perhaps tanked an entire industry. The defining moment will come 5 minutes after the realization of that failure. Will they sit and sulk? No. A leader will admit the fault, attack the problem and come out on the other side with a solution and move on to encounter another day of leading.

I’ve seen a variety of professional and personal failures that end up defining a leader for the worst, making them sound like “they were a leader once upon a time.” On the contrary, I’ve seen dozens of amazing leaders share their professional and personal failures and how they bounced back from them with the support of God, family and friends.

Don’t let the failure define you, overcome it with this truth from God’s word:

Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.

Galatians 6:9