Coaching practices for Visible Failures Seeking
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Visible Failures Seeking, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- All I ever hear from are the ones who made it
- There’s some specific disaster I’m bracing against with this goal
- Every time an approach flops I just throw it out and lunge at something totally different, and I keep slamming into the same wall
- I keep studying how the winners won, but it’s a thin lesson
- Something I tried just flopped and my instinct is to wince and bury it, but part of me suspects the way it went wrong is actually showing me something I’d never have seen if it had simply worked.
Practices that may help
- Actively seek out the failures you aren’t seeing
Look for the people who tried the same thing and didn’t make it through.
Survivorship Bias: Learning from What You Can’t See - Name the fear driving an avoidance goal
Surface the specific failure scenario an avoidance goal is bracing against.
Approach vs Avoidance Goals - Treat failed attempts as constraint-locators rather than dead ends
Each failed approach tells you precisely where the active constraint lives — mine that information before trying again.
Constraint Relaxation: Escaping the Walls You Built Yourself - Build a personal library of failure post-mortems
Deliberately collect, read, and learn from failure case studies in your domain.
Survivorship Bias: Learning from What You Can’t See - Treat errors as adjacent-possible expansion events
When something goes wrong, ask what new territory the failure has made visible that success would have hidden.
The Adjacent Possible, Made Practical - Use inversion as the first model in every problem
Before solving a problem, ask what would guarantee failure — then avoid those things.
Mental Models: Charlie Munger’s Latticework Approach - Canonical contrast after failure
After your attempts, examine the expert solution specifically for what your approaches were missing.
Productive Failure: How Struggling First Makes Instruction More Effective - Run a pre-mortem before committing to a plan
Imagine the plan has already failed and ask what went wrong.
Confirmation Bias: Seeing What You Expect to See - Balance the review with a genuine positive inventory
List three specific things you did well today — not three things that went well, but three things you did.
The Pythagorean Evening Review - Exception Finding: When Is the Problem Already Less Severe?
Identify times when the problem was absent or less severe — these are evidence that solutions already exist.
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: Building On What Works
Related concerns
- Startup Failure Analysis
Failure analysis contains the most actionable information in any honest review.
Spend more time on "what did not go well" than on what did
- Creative Failure Analysis
Each failed approach tells you precisely where the active constraint lives — mine that information before trying again.
Treat failed attempts as constraint-locators rather than dead ends
- Failure As Data
After any failure, immediately extract the specific information the error revealed about the problem.
Treating errors as data points
- How To Learn From Failure
After any failure, immediately extract the specific information the error revealed about the problem.
- Intelligent Failure
After any failure, immediately extract the specific information the error revealed about the problem.
- Learning From Failure
After any failure, immediately extract the specific information the error revealed about the problem.
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.