The leadership skill I'm practicing hardest right now? 🤔 Resilience — and I'm learning it by losing.

🧭 The leadership skill I'm practicing hardest right now? 🤔 Resilience — and I'm learning it by losing. 📆 Twice a week I live two opposite lives. 🏓 On the pickleball court, I almost always win. Two decades of competitive tennis gave me a head start most opponents can't catch. Winning is the easy teacher. 🥋 On the jiu-jitsu mat, I almost always lose. Six months in, I'm the beginner getting tapped by people I "should" beat. Losing is the hard teacher — and the better one. 💡 Here's why that gap matters, backed by the research: ➡️ Angela Duckworth studied **11,000+ West Point cadets** and found **grit predicts who succeeds better than talent, IQ, or fitness.** ➡️ Across five studies with **1,674 people**, Eskreis-Winkler & Fishbach found we actually **learn LESS from failure than success — 48% vs 62% correct on a follow-up test** — because losing bruises the ego and we stop paying attention. ➡️ A national experiment with **~12,500 students** (Yeager & Dweck, *Nature* 2019) showed a short **growth-mindset** lesson raised grades — proof that the will to keep learning is trainable. 🔖 Put it together: talent wins the easy games, grit wins the hard ones — but losing only makes you better if you stay humble enough to actually learn from it. ➡️ That's the behavior I'm working on as a leader: staying teachable when I win AND when I lose, and making it safe for my team to do the same. Degrees and titles hand you frameworks; the mat hands you humility — and humility is what keeps a leader learning. 💬 Where are you winning on old talent — and where are you brave enough to lose, and learn? 👇 — Fernando Bello · Author of "Find the Best — A Full Guide for Product Management" · LinkedIn Top Product Management Voice #Leadership #ProductLeadership #ProductManagement #AI #Management #Productivity #GrowthMindset 📚 Sources for the stats: ➡️ Grit / West Point (Angela Duckworth): https://lnkd.in/dW5HNjM6 ➡️ We learn less from failure than success (Eskreis-Winkler & Fishbach, 2019): https://lnkd.in/dC8BPYPB ➡️ Growth-mindset national study (Yeager & Dweck, Nature 2019): https://lnkd.in/dx_M7M7r