I failed the LSAT. Basically, if I had not failed, I’d have been a lawyer and there would be no Spanx. I think failure is nothing more than life’s way of nudging you that you are off course. My attitude to failure is not attached to outcome, but in not trying. It is liberating.

Blakely frames a pivotal setback—failing the LSAT—as a productive redirection rather than a verdict on her ability. In her telling, “failure” becomes diagnostic: it signals misalignment with one’s path and pushes experimentation toward a better fit. She also separates failure from external outcomes (test scores, acceptance, conventional success) and ties it instead to agency and effort: the only real failure is not trying. This reframing helps explain an entrepreneurial mindset in which rejection and mistakes are expected costs of discovery, and where liberation comes from detaching self-worth from results while staying committed to action.