I'm Manuel Saez, a product executive, builder, and two-time founder. I write about leadership, decision-making, self-awareness, and what I’ve learned building products, teams, and businesses.
When I was around ten years old, I spent a Sunday afternoon helping my dad cut tree branches that had grown over our house. We had just come back from playing rugby.
He was up on a ladder with a chainsaw while a few people stood below managing ropes to make sure the branches did not damage the roof when they fell.
Then I heard a loud crash.
One of the branches had gone straight through the roof and left a big hole.
My dad climbed down, walked around the house, looked up at the damage, and said a few times, with a smile:
“Para qué vivir en reproche.”
Why live in reproach?
At the time, I did not fully understand what he meant.
Years later, I did.
He was not pretending the mistake had not happened. The roof still had a hole in it. There was work to do.
He simply did not see any value in extending the life of the mistake through guilt and blame.
That stayed with me.
As a founder, I have made plenty of mistakes. I have felt anger, embarrassment, guilt, and regret.
But watching my dad that day gave me an early glimpse of another way to deal with them.
Acknowledge what happened.
Take responsibility.
Fix what you can.
Learn from it.
Then move forward.
The Myth of Perfection
A lot of founders are competitive and demanding of themselves. I am too.
Some of that can be useful. High standards can push us to do better work.
The problem starts when those standards turn into the expectation that we should always get things right.
That is impossible.
When I make a mistake, I still feel disappointment, frustration, and sometimes guilt.
But I have learned that repeatedly punishing myself for the same mistake does not make me better. It just keeps me stuck in it.
I also try to remember that decisions are made with the information, experience, energy, and judgment available at the time.
Looking backward, with everything I know now, can make the right answer seem obvious.
It usually was not.
That does not mean I excuse the mistake.
I still want to understand what happened, take responsibility for my part, and learn from it.
What I try not to do is turn one bad decision into a judgment about myself.
For me, acceptance creates the space to do something more useful with the mistake.
Learn from it. Adjust. And keep moving.
Overcoming Self-Blame in the Startup World
Founders can be incredibly hard on themselves.
When the stakes are high, every bad decision can feel bigger than it is. A mistake can quickly turn into frustration, guilt, or the feeling that I should have known better.
I have done that many times.
The problem is that self-blame keeps my attention on what already happened.
It does not help me fix the problem.
What helps more is acknowledging the mistake, understanding what happened, and putting my energy into what comes next.
I also think the way a leader responds to mistakes affects the team.
If I treat every mistake like a failure of character, people become more cautious and more likely to hide problems.
If I can talk openly about my own mistakes and what I learned from them, it creates more room for other people to do the same.
That does not mean lowering standards.
It means creating an environment where mistakes can be examined honestly instead of buried under blame.
What Helps Me Move Forward
Practice Self-Compassion:
I try to speak to myself the way I would speak to someone I care about who had made the same mistake.That does not mean excusing what happened.
It means remembering that one bad decision does not define me.
I can hold myself accountable without attacking myself.
Focus on Solutions, Not Blame:
Once the mistake has happened, I try to shift my attention toward what can still be done.What can I fix?
What needs to change?
What can I do differently next time?
That mindset helps me move from regret into action.
Reflect and Learn:
When the mistake is meaningful, I often do a simple post-mortem.I ask what happened, why it happened, what I missed, and what I would do differently next time.
I try to do this once the emotion has settled enough that I can look at the situation clearly.
For me, that is when a mistake becomes useful.
I cannot change what happened.
But I can make sure I learn something from it.
Turning Mistakes Into Opportunities
One thing emotional intelligence has helped me do is create a little distance between the mistake and my reaction to it.
When something goes wrong, my first response is not always useful.
I can get frustrated. I can become defensive. I can blame myself.
What helps is noticing that reaction before I let it take over.
Once I can step back, the mistake usually looks different.
I can ask what it is trying to teach me.
What did I miss?
What assumption was wrong?
What should I change?
That shift matters.
The mistake itself does not become good, but it can become useful.
As a founder, I have learned that the real advantage is not avoiding mistakes.
It is getting better at extracting something valuable from them and moving forward with more clarity.
The Power of Accepting Your Mistakes
For me, acceptance is one of the most useful ways to deal with failure.
When something goes wrong, my instinct can be to replay it, question myself, or focus on what I should have done differently.
Acceptance helps me stop fighting the fact that it already happened.
That does not mean excusing the mistake.
It means acknowledging what happened, taking responsibility for my part, and deciding what I can learn from it.
I also try to remember that I made the decision with the information, experience, and judgment I had at the time.
Looking back, the better choice can seem obvious.
In the moment, it usually was not.
That perspective helps me recover faster and put my energy into what comes next instead of extending the life of the mistake through self-blame.
I wrote more about this in The Power of Acceptance.
For me, the lesson is simple.
Self-blame keeps me tied to the past.
Acceptance helps me take responsibility, learn, and move forward.
I still want to understand my mistakes.
I still want to improve.
I just no longer believe I need to punish myself to do either.
Sending you good vibes 🌻
Manuel Saez