After Action Report – Empowerment of Failure
“It’s so easy to be great nowadays because everyone else is weak. If you have ANY mental toughness, if you have any fraction of self-discipline; the ability to not want to do it, but still do it; If you can get through to doing things that you hate to do: on the other side is GREATNESS” – David Goggins
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Empowerment of failure
David Goggins is the World’s Toughest Man Alive. His book, “Can’t Hurt Me” describes the story of his transformation from a depressed, physically abused kid to the U.S. Armed Forces icon and beyond. He has an astonishing list of achievements. His story will move you emotionally and literally; it makes you want to grab your shoes and go out to run.
According to him, failure is the most significant gift of all. Dissecting the failure and analyzing it will teach you the greatest lessons, which is hard to find somewhere else. It is a stepping stone to future success. He calls this empowerment of failure. This is where he introduces the concept of After Action Reports (AAR’s).
In the military, after every real-world mission or field exercise, AAR’s are filled out. This serves as live autopsies. When you are venturing into uncharted territory, there are no books to study, no YouTube instruction videos to watch, no posts to read. When you encounter failure, all you can read is your mistakes.
Writing your own belated AAR is one of the challenges he assigns to the reader in his book.
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How to write an After Action Report
Think about your most recent and your most heart-wrenching failures. Break out the journal. Write what all steps you took, the techniques and methods you followed before going into your mission. Did you follow a plan? If yes, How did you plan this out?
Then, write out all the good things, everything that went well. Be detailed and generous with yourself; a lot of good things have happened. It’s rarely all bad.
Write how did you handle your failures? Did it affect your life? How so? What were you thinking about during execution? You have to know how you were thinking at each step because it is all about mindset, and that’s where most people fall short.
Once you have detailed information, you can make a list of things you can fix. This is not the time to be soft and generous. Be brutally honest, write them all out, study them. This enriches your experience, allows you to come up with an even better plan.
Control your mindset. Dominate your thought process. And if you fail, you try again.
This kind of analysis is not limited to the military alone. It is seen in various other industries. In sports, coaches have to do it all the time. Scientists, engineers, and Doctors also follow a similar method. Even every one of us does it to a certain conscious or unconscious level, all the time. The real difference comes when we consciously analyze every single detail. This will give us a unique experience to draw from.
I encourage you to conduct your AAR after your every endeavour, regardless of the outcome.
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During my first attempt at GATE in 2015, I received All India Rank(AIR) 381. But that was not enough to get into the best Institute in the country. So, I had to give GATE again. This time, I made a rigorous analysis of my preparation methods, just like AAR, and came up with a much better way to prepare. In the following GATE 2016, I received AIR 89.
“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” -Archilochus
From experience, I have gained. I designed a program to prepare for competitive exams. This program worked incredibly well for all my students. Write now you can check “How to crack GATE“.
Take away from this session:
- Make AAR
- Include every detail
- What went right and why (Dos)
- What went wrong and why (Don’ts)
- what you can fix and improve
“Convert your Failure into your Wisdom.”
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Thanks for reading. I hope you find this helpful. 🙂