Reframing work as a continuum of learning experiences and refinement can mitigate a self-assessed sense of failure.

Andy Lopata offers teachable examples of how to stop making failure a binary, often self-assessed, judgment.

Roberto Forzoni, a performance psychologist who has worked with a number of leading sports teams and high-performing sports stars like tennis player Andy Murray, explains that we tend to assess our performance based on either ego-orientation or task-orientation. When we are ego-oriented, we focus more on what people think about us or what we think about ourselves, rather than how well we perform the task itself. And that impacts our view of what constitutes success or failure.

Andy Lopata, Psychology Today
Why Do You Think You’ve Failed? How we decide on failure and how it distorts our path.

It seems if we reframe our work as a process of continual learning, the sense of failure is mitigated. Maybe the only failure is not learning.