The deepest learning arrived through failure. A confident view can be wrong, and when it is wrong at scale, the damage is personal. The fall was not only financial; it was psychological.
What hurt most was seeing how my own certainty helped create the outcome. I wasn’t defeated by complexity alone. I was defeated by blind spots, overconfidence, and the need to prove I was right.
The way out wasn’t motivation. It was humility made practical: rebuild by studying what happened, identifying the exact causes, and changing the decision process so the same mistake becomes harder to repeat.
Pain became a signal. If it was approached directly, it could be converted into a better machine—one that survives being wrong and learns faster because of it.