From Soccer Bench to EOD to Michigan Ross: Why My Failures Shaped My Career

I didn't plan to join EOD. I planned to be a Navy SEAL.

I got partway through the pipeline, left, and found myself in a holding pattern, still in the Navy, still wanting something that tested me, without a clear path forward. A mentor suggested EOD. I'd never heard of it.

That suggestion changed everything.

The Soccer Story

Before the Navy, there was a smaller failure that I've come to think of as the template for all the ones that followed.

I was cut from my high school soccer team. Not an early cut, late enough that I'd expected to make it, committed to it, built a version of my near-future identity around it.

The cut was brutal in the way only specific teenage disappointments can be. But what happened next mattered more than the cut itself.

I got obsessive. Not about soccer, about training. About finding where I could compete at a level that matched how I actually wanted to push myself. I stopped trying to fit the mold I'd been rejected from and started looking for the environment where my particular intensity was an advantage rather than a liability.

I found it. And the pattern that emerged, fail, reorient, find the environment that fits, repeated itself throughout my career.

The SEAL Pipeline

SEAL training is designed to break people. Not maliciously, the job requires people who don't break, so the training finds out who they are.

I left. It would be easy to dress this up as a strategic decision, but it was more complicated than that. What I learned about what I was built for and what I wasn't was worth the experience, even though the outcome wasn't what I'd planned.

EOD found me shortly after. And in EOD, I found something I hadn't expected: the combination of technical problem-solving, high-stakes execution, and the constant requirement to adapt in real time was exactly the environment where I performed best. Not just adequately, at a level I hadn't accessed before.

The failure sent me to the right place.

Michigan Ross

Twenty years later, I was transitioning out of the Navy. I applied to Michigan Ross and Wharton. I got into both.

By any conventional logic, Wharton was the answer. Higher ranked, more famous, larger network in finance and consulting.

I chose Ross.

Not because Wharton was a failure, it wasn't, they said yes. But because I'd learned by then to ask a different question: not "what is the most prestigious option" but "which environment makes the best version of my performance possible?"

Ross had a culture and a curriculum that fit what I was actually trying to build. The Airbnb consulting engagement came through Ross's Action Learning program. The cohort was more operationally diverse. The emphasis on applied work matched how I'd spent 20 years learning, not from lectures, but from doing.

The Pattern

Every significant career pivot I've made has looked like a failure on the way in and made sense on the way out.

Cut from the team → found a better fit.

Left SEAL training → found EOD.

Chose the "lesser" MBA → got the better education for the work I'm actually doing.

The thread isn't that failure is secretly good. It's that failure is information, specific, accurate, often painful information about where you're misaligned with the environment you're in.

The question isn't "how do I avoid failure?" It's "What is this failure telling me about where I need to go next?"

The Insight

I've met people who collect their failures as evidence of their limitations. And I've met people who read their failures as redirections.

The second group isn't more talented. They're better at asking different questions when things don't go the way they planned.

The Takeaway

Think about the failure in your career you've tried hardest to put behind you. Ask one question about it: where did it send you that you wouldn't have gone otherwise?

If the answer is "nowhere," you're probably not done processing it yet. If the answer is "here," you already know what I mean.