Real success, real failure, real people

On the ever growing list of “Who Remembers How These Things Worked Before the Internet?” is the finding of so-called real people for articles–that is, people who will speak on the record about their own personal experiences. Rather than an expert trend analyst who comments on data, these people are in fact a single data point.

For this piece on how the most successful people have learned from failure, I had a wide-open brief to find women who had had failure in success in almost any sphere of life.

There’s strength in vulnerability: The very willingness that these women show to share the challenges of their professional and personal lives is the mark of somebody who is not stuck in the closed mindset of somebody who can only equate mistakes or setbacks as failure.

The reality is that when you ask one successful woman to point to another, it’s both easy and a pleasure for her to do so.