Jul 7, 2026 · 32 min · 12 segments
In this episode, Jonathan Malm and Jason Young unpack Chapter 6 of *How to Get a Return on Failure* by John Maxwell, walking through Maxwell's practical "cycle of improvement" and making the case that…
I think what Maxwell is saying, and even in the title of the book, Return, How to Get a Return on Failure, the goal is improvement.
And in this chapter, it's a... tangible piece of how can you use a tool, and he calls it the cycle of success, I think is his language, but this improvement cycle to literally kind of step your way through the failure to improvement.
So a lot of words, but I would say the goal, we're not talking about the goal being failure.
Well, and I really got that this chapter is more about putting yourself in a situation where you can fail.
But then how do you navigate? Because the reality is, and we talked about this in the chapter, that most things you try for the first time, you're going to be bad at.
He talked about, and I thought this was a horrible idea, that he had a friend in Nashville that wanted him to write songs based on some of the principles in his book.
It seems like such a bad idea, but I respect the idea that John was like, okay, I'm going to try to write a song based on my books.
I think what Maxwell is saying, and even in the title of the book, Return, How to Get a Return on Failure, the goal is improvement.
And in this chapter, it's a... tangible piece of how can you use a tool, and he calls it the cycle of success, I think is his language, but this improvement cycle to literally kind of step your way through the failure to improvement.
So a lot of words, but I would say the goal, we're not talking about the goal being failure.
Well, and I really got that this chapter is more about putting yourself in a situation where you can fail.
But then how do you navigate? Because the reality is, and we talked about this in the chapter, that most things you try for the first time, you're going to be bad at.
He talked about, and I thought this was a horrible idea, that he had a friend in Nashville that wanted him to write songs based on some of the principles in his book.
It seems like such a bad idea, but I respect the idea that John was like, okay, I'm going to try to write a song based on my books.
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