This debrief was less lecture and more storytelling, built around the chapter on failing forward. Each person had to bring one deal that fell apart and explain what they did in the first 24 hours after. The pattern Larry points to is speed, the people who recover fastest are the ones who forgive the situation fast and move, which lines up with the karma chapter’s rule to forgive quickly.
One story involved a signed verbal agreement that evaporated when the other side’s budget got cut, no drama, just a changed circumstance. Another attendee had pitched three variations of the same offer before one stuck, which is the ‘sell it first, then go make it’ habit playing out in real time. The room agreed that house money made the retelling easier, nobody was retelling a story about rent money lost.
In his own words, Larry’s framing is that a failed pitch is just a test you run before you’re sure of the material, straight out of PQRST’s last step. A few people admitted they’d sat on a failed deal for weeks instead of debriefing it right away.
The group’s fix for that was simple, write down what happened within a day, even if the note is three lines. Nobody in the room described a failure that sounded like the end of anything, just a redirect.
The debrief closed on the idea that a good fail-forward story is really just a karma story about forgiving fast, aimed at yourself instead of someone else. The video that sparked this week’s chapter is linked below.
Details: Watch Larry’s fail-forward stories
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