Fail scale

An interesting idea I heard recently is "near miss reporting". Instead of doing failure analysis as part of the reaction to a failure, it's much better if you can start that analysis before the failure has actually occured. I think there is something really compelling about taking failure from a binary to a scale. Maybe it wasn't a failure exactly, but "not quite as much success as you'd like" is still a valuable signal.

It also makes for an interesting way of quantifying your own goals. If you think in terms of simple pass/fail, you're wiping out a lot of nuanced information. How much did you succeed? If you just scraped over the line, that's not the same thing as succeeding easily. For anything you want to be able to do consistently, like a skill or a habit, relaxing before you hit the comfortable win stage may well mean you slip back into failure when you stop focusing.

It might even be worth considering at what point a win is too easy - perhaps if you go all the way into the green zone it's worth taking on a harder challenge or spending less effort next time.