Warren Buffett’s Advice on Failure Is Only 7 Words, and Every Leader Should Remember It

Failure has become one of those business words people like to dress up in inspirational wallpaper. We write about it on Inc., slap it on keynote slides, call it “learning,” and pretend every setback is secretly a TED Talk waiting to happen.

Let’s be honest. Failure usually feels awful. One of my biggest failures — crafting a year-long leadership development proposal for a large healthcare chain and losing it to an established competitor—felt like a gut punch delivered by Mike Tyson. It also felt like a total waste of time.

For many entrepreneurs, failure happens. A lot. It feels like watching the door close while everyone else seems to be walking through theirs with a promotion or a new account.

Warren Buffett’s Take on Failing in 7 Words

But Warren Buffett has always had a wonderfully plain way of cutting through the drama. In a 2013 live-streamed interview, he was asked how he deals with business failure and what advice he would give others facing it. His answer was not complicated. He said:

“Dust yourself off and get back in.”

Buffett added, “You are going to fail at some things.”

He then pointed to his own life: after graduating from the University of Nebraska, he traveled for 10 hours to interview at Harvard Business School and was almost immediately rejected. That rejection sent him to Columbia, where he studied under Benjamin Graham, the mentor whose ideas shaped Buffett’s investing life.

The Real Lesson

The part worth noticing is not that Buffett bounced back. Plenty of people bounce back. The better lesson is that he did not turn one rejection into a verdict on his future. He did not decide that Harvard’s “no” meant he was finished, unworthy, or somehow disqualified from greatness. He treated it as information. Painful information, sure, but still information.