Why Stephen Schwarzman Tells Future Leaders to Welcome Failure

Most commencement speeches celebrate what’s possible. Schwarzman’s go further — they confront what’s inevitable.

“Failures, I want them to know, can teach us more than any success.”

— Stephen A. Schwarzman, What It Takes

Schwarzman wrote these words in the epilogue of What It Takes, reflecting on what he tells graduating Schwarzman Scholars each year — a cohort of some of the most accomplished young people on the planet. These are individuals who have already succeeded by almost every conventional measure. And yet, the lesson he chooses to leave them with isn’t about compounding their wins. It’s about preparing for the losses. He tells them directly: resilience in the face of adversity, not the adversity itself, is what defines a person.

This isn’t a platitude from someone who skated through on good fortune. Schwarzman co-founded Blackstone in 1985 with $400,000 and a string of early rejections. The firm’s first fundraise took nearly a year and dozens of meetings before it gained traction. He built one of the world’s largest alternative asset managers not by avoiding hard moments, but by extracting more from them than his competitors were willing to. The man speaking to those scholars has lived the lesson he’s teaching.

What makes this insight worth sitting with is how directly it cuts against the way most ambitious people actually operate. High achievers are often conditioned to minimize failure — to move past it quickly, reframe it, or quietly bury it. Schwarzman is arguing the opposite: go into the failure, study it, let it instruct you. Success confirms what you already know. Failure reveals what you don’t. The gap between those two things is where real capability is built.

The practical implication is simple but demanding. It requires honesty most people avoid. When something goes wrong — a deal falls through, a hire doesn’t work, a strategy collapses — the instinct is to assign blame and move on. The Schwarzman approach is to slow down and ask what the failure is actually showing you about your own judgment, assumptions, or blind spots. That kind of audit, done consistently, compounds over time in ways that a string of unchallenged successes never can.

The Memo

• Treat each failure as a debrief, not a detour — when something goes wrong, schedule time to examine it with the same rigor you’d apply to a successful deal. The discomfort is the point.

• Resist the rush to reframe too quickly — there’s a difference between healthy perspective and premature closure. Let the lesson fully surface before you move on.

• Measure your growth by what you’ve learned from losses, not just by what you’ve accumulated from wins — the latter is visible; the former is durable.