The real wisdom here isn't about resilience as we typically celebrate it—bouncing back stronger, learning hard lessons, that sort of thing. Mandela is asking us to flip our entire measurement of human worth: he's saying that the *frequency* of failure matters more than its absence, and that a life unmarked by falls is actually impoverished. When you interview someone for a job or measure yourself against peers, notice how we obsessively count the wins and hide the stumbles; Mandela suggests that's precisely backwards. A surgeon who's never made a mistake might simply never have tried anything difficult enough to risk one.