Where have you failed in your professional work? How did you respond to that failure? It is a common interview question. One many people dread. Consider failure as one of the best teaching tools you can find, and look to grow from your failure.

I recall coaching seminar on professional transition and mapping out the highs and lows of my life up to that point. The exercise was to create an annotated line chart with the ups and downs, and explain each peak and valley. A clear takeaway for me was the relationship between the highs and lows. The low-points on my graph translated into some of the highest highs. I would never have reached my high points without the lows.

I started a business in the beginning of 2000 to create and deliver a web-based physician practice management solution. I did everything from building the software to finding the office space and hiring people to help scale the company. We were not huge, we grew to about 12 people and six customers. We lasted less than a year before we were unable to raise enough money to keep growing. We scaled back our people and we began consulting to support three people and keep the doors open.

I finally had to take a full-time job after 9/11 and the clients slowly switch to other solutions. My subsequent roles as an executive in companies small and large were all served by the failure I had starting this company. Although the company failed, I had learned the equivalent of a graduate degree in finance, operations, accounting and product launch. I recall much later reading the book The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and the stories resonated even though the scale of company was very different.

The lesson was reflected also by James Dyson, the famous inventor of the cyclone vacuum. He speaks about how many lessons he learned from failure. He has similar lessons from previous business. He has so many stories of design failures. He speaks fondly of the failures as setting him up for the eventual success of his current business.

Be open to failure and taking risk. Reflect on your failures and leverage them for the learning experiences. When you look at failure as an opportunity to improve, you can benefit from failure as well as success.