I remember it like it was yesterday. I was in the air returning from a speaking engagement in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida when the Captain came over the radio to tell us that our path would be diverted because of a major malfunction with the NASA space shuttle, Challenger.

The shuttle was coincidentally taking off as we were to pass over Kennedy Space Center heading north to my home at the time in Lexington, SC. We would later learn the rest of the tragic story.

I had just spoken to NASA some six months prior to that catastrophic event and I later learned that some of those astronauts, Ron McNair, Christa McAuliffe and Michael Smith were part of that audience.

It would be six months after the Challenger disaster that I would receive a return phone call to come back to speak to NASA and her many contractors again, this time to shore up their confidence and help them to refocus on their mission after such a terrible tragedy.

I recall vividly that was one of the most difficult presentations I ever had to prepare. What do you say to people who have lost a loved one? What do you say to an industry that has lost an integral part of its mission and now must find the courage to continue the task?

I speak a lot on the subject of change. The title of my favorite presentation on change is a quote from the great Italian philosopher Yogi Berra. He once said “The trouble with the future is it ain’t what it used to be!” Could there be a better way of describing the mess in which NASA now found itself? Their future could never be defined the way it had.

Fast forward to the Columbia disaster on February 1, 2003, resulting from a punctured hole in the wing that allowed searing gases generated by reentry into earth’s atmosphere. Just when it seemed like NASA was finally recovering from its earlier loss, this one, some critics would argue, would end the space program altogether.

Again, I was called on by United Space Alliance, a NASA contractor, to come back and address NASA and many of the folks who had put Columbia together. This message was even more difficult to construct. Many of the same folks involved with Challenger were also on board for the construction and launch of Columbia.

Today, NASA engineers and their contractors walk on egg shells, hoping to learn from their past and never replicate the errors of yesteryear. One needs only to look at the many delays in the final three missions. Discovery was to have launched in early November, but many flaws that have been identified by NASA’s engineers and contractors, has pushed the tentative launch date up.

One must study one’s mistakes to prevent the repetition of those errors, a lesson that NASA learned after Challenger loss. Many engineers, whom I confidentially interviewed in preparation for the presentation following the loss of Challenger, privately shared with me that their colleagues had become gun shy… and this was stalling the entire rebuilding process.

History is cluttered with millions stories about failure being a learning tool. Thomas Edison failed thousands of times before he finally invented the light bulb. And make no mistake; failure is the process by which we succeed in life. It should therefore follow that in order to have more success, we need more failure. From a pure management perspective, we should be encouraging people to fail faster.

I realize that this philosophy flies in the face of traditional thinking. I’m not suggesting that we need to crash this shuttle to learn how to make the next one a success. We should learn as much as we can from our failures and move on. If we wait until everything is perfect in life, I submit we might never start the process at all.

Courage is therefore as an important an ingredient to the achievement process as creativity and knowledge and all the other things that make success possible. I’m fond of telling my sales people, who service some 35,000 Knights of Columbus policy holders from our 16 offices in central Florida, that if you’re selling them all you aren’t seeing them all. Selling, like medicine and many professions, is a business that presupposes a frequent amount of failure.

No matter what you do in life, never be afraid to fail. If you’re afraid of that, perhaps another profession in government is more suitable.