Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?

The real cost of throwing away experience

Most of us have been taught to fear expensive mistakes. We replay them endlessly, feel the sting of judgment, and assume we're marked as unreliable. But this reveals a fundamental shift in how we should think about failure: the real waste isn't the mistake itself—it's discarding someone the moment they've finally learned something valuable through experience.

The counterintuitive part is that the most useful people often aren't the ones who've never failed. They're the ones who've failed, felt it, understood why, and adjusted. That $600,000 loss—while genuinely painful—has now become embedded knowledge that person can't unlearn. They know what doesn't work. They know the consequences. That's precisely what makes them more valuable going forward, not less. Firing them recycles that expensive lesson back out into the world.

This matters beyond corporate life. It applies to how we treat ourselves when we mess up financially, miss important deadlines, or make relationship missteps. The temptation is to see the mistake as proof of our inadequacy. But what if we borrowed Watson's logic? The cost has already been paid. The only question left is whether we'll benefit from what it taught us.