Why We Fail | LSW#56

The 4 H's of 🧠Head, ❤️Heart, 👋Hand, and 🐝Hive

Wisdom doesn’t come automatically with age. Sometimes, we just get older and dumber. We’ve all seen “experienced” folks with years under their belt but lacking the thinking to go with it.

Learning from failures isn’t guaranteed. Often, we don’t learn from setbacks and repeat the same mistakes.

What makes the difference? Skilled reflection. In this edition, I share a useful heuristic to help you reflect more skillfully.

Hey! It’s Sheril Mathews from Leading Sapiens. Welcome to my newsletter, where I share strategies for getting savvier at the game of work. Links to previous editions and newer posts from my blog are at the bottom.

---

Leo Tolstoy’s classic Anna Karenina opens with this line:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Like unhappy families, failure happens in unique ways. At the same time, “success” has necessary conditions.

How can we avoid the blindspots of Tolstoy’s unhappy families? And why do some folks get wiser with experience while others stagnate?

The key lies in self-awareness and reflection. By actively reflecting on mistakes, we can use failures as a tool for developing wisdom.

A useful heuristic for reflecting on setbacks and failures is the distinction of the 4 H’s of head, heart, hand, and hive.

• 🧠 Head is strategy, intellect, and rational thinking. It’s the cognitive aspect of planning, analysis, and decision-making.

• ❤️Heart is about purpose and commitment. It’s the inner alignment that provides clarity of direction and meaning. Without purpose and commitment, actions feel empty, aimless, and unsustainable. Conversely, commitment without rational thought (head) or proper action (hand) results in misdirected effort.

• 👋Hand is the practical, operational component—aka execution. Ideas without action are useless, and action turns plans into reality. Mastering the hand means honing follow-through, accountability, and sustained effort. Disciplined action should follow purposeful thought; equally, actions lead to insights that thinking alone couldn’t reach.

• 🐝 Hive reflects the collective. It shows how much we depend on others and collaboration. It’s the insights, knowledge, and wisdom outside ourselves, whether from a close friend or an ancient philosopher.

Just as Tolstoy's unhappy families with unique struggles, our failures often stem from neglecting one or more of these dimensions. When I examine my own failures and those of my clients, I can attribute them to one of these elements:

• I might have been conventionally successful, but I failed internally (no heart).

• I got everything right but missed avoidable blindspots without help (no hive).

• I strategized everything to the maximum, only to talk myself out of it (no hand).

• I pursued something on instinct alone, only to realize I hadn’t thought it through (no head).

The common pattern I’ve seen is that we’re missing one element while excelling at the other three. This is not “scientific” but a useful heuristic I’ve found over the years.

Growth comes from recognizing habitual patterns and deliberately developing what we usually neglect.

Common failure modes

Neglecting any dimension too long has far-reaching consequences, not just as short-term failure but also in how we perceive and shape our work and lives.

🧠Neglecting the head: fragmented short-termism

If we neglect head—strategic thinking, reflection, and analysis—we don’t just make bad decisions. We live in a state of short-termism, reacting impulsively to immediate pressures and opportunities without a sense of the bigger picture. Life becomes fragmented, where each action is disconnected from a broader trajectory.

This changes our approach to time, goals, and meaning.

We operate without context. Every decision feels urgent, every challenge monumental, because there’s no larger framework to place these experiences. This increases stress and anxiety. A lack of strategic thought makes problems feel insurmountable when, in fact, they are smaller pieces of a larger, solvable puzzle.

This stunts long-term development, as we focus on immediate needs instead of building toward something larger.

❤️Neglecting the heart: hollow victories

Lack of purpose and commitment leads to more than just unfulfillment. It drives a hollow pursuit of success yieldingexternal achievements, leaving us empty and disillusioned. This emptiness creeps into other aspects of life, eroding joy and meaning.

You may achieve your goals, but the absence of emotional resonance makes those accomplishments feel hollow. This disconnect ultimately becomes numbness—a sense that life’s victories aren’t as fulfilling as you imagined.

Neglecting the heart diminishes resilience. Purpose fuels perseverance, especially when results are delayed and difficult. Without a strong sense of why we're doing something, it's easy to give up when the path gets tough. A difficult challenge becomes an overwhelming obstacle without the emotional drive to push through.

👋Neglecting the hand: stagnated potential

The lack of action is an obvious failure, but the implications are more insidious. Neglecting the hand doesn’t just result in missed opportunities; it alters our perception of our capabilities.

The longer we avoid taking action, the more we question our ability. Inaction breeds self-doubt, making future action harder.

Neglecting action also creates passivity. You stop seeing yourself as an active agent of change. It leads to an existential drift where life happens to us instead of being shaped by our decisions. This turns into learned helplessness, where taking action feels impossible, even in the face of obvious opportunities.

🐝Neglecting the hive: delusional self-sufficiency

Neglecting the hive leads to more than isolation. It creates an illusion of self-sufficiency where we believe we don’t need external input or collaboration to succeed. This narrows our thinking, leading to missed opportunities and detachment from the larger systems and communities essential to growth.

By shutting out collective wisdom, you end up in an intellectual echo chamber. Your ideas, although brilliant, go unchallenged and untested. This leads to stagnation, rigid thinking, and stunted creativity.

🪞Reflection questions

To avoid the above patterns, make a routine of asking the following questions in your weekly and quarterly reviews. Some suggestions:

Weekly(basic)

• Did I reflect on my actions this week (head)?

• Am I motivated by purpose and aligned with my commitments (heart)?

• Did I execute my plans and take concrete steps (hand)?

• Am I actively seeking insights and perspectives outside my own thinking (hive)?

Quarterly(deeper)

Head (Strategic Thinking)

1. Have I fundamentally changed my perspective on something important? What helped make this shift?

2. What uncomfortable truth about myself or my role am I avoiding?

3. How am I balancing short-term pressures with my long-term visions?

Heart (Purpose and Commitment)

1. What aspects of work energize me? What is draining? What does this reveal about my motivations?

2. When have my values clashed with professional expectations? How did I navigate it? What did I learn?

3. How can I maintain my sense of purpose during intense stress?

Hand (Execution)

1. Where am I mistaking activity for progress? How can I focus more on impact?

2. When did I show flexibility? When did I persist despite challenges? What were the outcomes?

3. Have my personal growth “metrics” evolved? Am I measuring what truly matters?

Hive (Collective Wisdom)

1. Who has provided me with the most valuable insights or challenging perspectives? How can I engage more with diverse viewpoints?

2. What's the most surprising or contradictory advice I got? How did I respond?

3. How open have I been to feedback and criticism? Where did I dismiss valuable input?

Managing tensions

Once we’re aware of the four dimensions, the next challenge is managing the tensions this creates without getting frustrated. Growth in one area causes strains in another. Deepening cognitive mastery (head) creates tension with the drive for immediate action (hand). These are not problems to be solved away but instead energies to be managed, even played with.

The tension between rational strategy and deep commitment can cause inner conflict. Cognitive clarity can challenge your sense of purpose. If you become overly focused on analysis, you may rationalize away commitments that require a leap of faith. Mastery isn’t about choosing one over the other but recognizing when logic should lead and when purpose requires an irrational dedication that defies pure reasoning.

Impatience to act can stifle the need for leaning on collective wisdom. This tension asks: When do I move forward with my own intuition, and when do I pause to learn from the collective? Mastery means the discipline to seek input from others to figure out a missing piece that individual action alone can’t solve. It also means knowing when to ignore so-called “advice,” including this one.

Society will try to put us into one of these buckets like thinker, doer, introvert, extrovert, etc. Mastery involves a fluid self-concept, where you can shift between modalities as needed. Rigidly identifying as a thinker, for instance, limits our growth.

The heart (purpose and commitment) is a deeper, organizing principle for the other three elements. Without a guiding purpose, the other dimensions exist in a vacuum—intelligent thinking without direction, action without meaning, or collective insight without personal alignment.

Purpose provides the gravitational pull that keeps the other elements in orbit, ensuring each contributes to a larger goal. The heart serves as the “why” behind all “what” and “how.” Our deep-rooted issues start from neglecting this dimension for too long.

---

To conclude, neglect isn’t just about what you miss in the moment. It’s about how that neglect compounds over time, shifting our internal narrative, eroding confidence, and limiting our capacity to evolve.

Mastery lies in understanding these hidden costs and skillfully integrating all four dimensions into play.

Previous editions ICYMI