Professional failure: lessons learned from career setback

Failure teaches more than success ever can. My greatest failure reveals the human tendency towards hubris. Luckily the incident happened early enough in my career that my ego was not bruised too badly and I bounced back better than ever. I believed so strongly in the supreme power of my superior technical skills that I was completely unprepared for the major blow that failure would bring. After all, a track record of successfully completed projects had me coasting right along. Moreover, my clients offered no end of positive feedback -- as did my supervisors and my colleagues. I was on top of the world creating and implementing unique networking solutions and services that were used by millions of users.

Why should I, a technical genius, pay attention to boring stuff like returns on investment? That gobbledygook was for finance majors. Capital productivity, customer service, capacity utilization, and process analysis? I was like a child covering my ears when I did not want to hear "no" for an answer. Deep down I heard the sensible whisper of a mentor trying to calm me down and say, "Pay attention to your professional growth, or you will soon crash!" The whisper was promptly ignored, its warnings unheeded as I bullheadedly stomped my way forward.

When I had to justify an expenditure on a new email system, the first signs of breakdown started to appear. These small cracks soon escalated. I was asked to calculate the operational cost of the system over the next three years. I was supposed to project the best, most likely, and worst case scenarios of customer acquisition projections. At this point I did not even know how to approach the task. Shouldn't my technical and creative genius be enough for the project managers? I was the heart and soul of a world class Internet Service Provider. So it did not matter that I could not create a detailed cost-benefit analysis.