Thanks for sharing your excellent thoughts and experiences, I empathize with this perspective big time! 😊

Failure is a better teacher than success in the same way that scars teach us more than high fives; I think you’ve hit on a great point here. It’s quite possible that great leadership skills are more likely to emerge when you’ve experienced leadership mistakes than if you’ve been under a lot of good leaders!

Great leaders can be misleading to emulate, I’ve often seen people struggle to copy what good leaders do. I believe this is because great leaders have internalized a lot of lessons that we don’t have the context of, and there’s a lot of thought and intentionality going on behind the scenes that we can’t see.

When someone makes mistakes as a leader, you can clearly feel and understand the consequences of their actions. You don’t have to understand their motivations to permanently internalize the event as something you don’t want to do yourself as a leader in the future. This can have a more lasting imprint on you than what you learned from good leaders.