Rethinking mistakes: lessons from the UAE
On February 2, 2025, Melissa Yacoub and I hosted a MasterClass at the Sharjah Entrepreneurship Festival (SEF) in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. At the festival’s opening, the Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi stated: “For the longest time, our stories have been told by the West. It is important that we write our own stories.” This sentiment applies not just to the different emirates but also to founders, businesses, and entire economies. And in our MasterClass, we it honed in on how we interpret, learn from, and grow through setbacks. In essence, we focused on the “how” - how professionals (including startup founders) can change how they perceive the process of making mistakes.
how to reframe mistakes
In our MasterClass, Failing Forward: Building Resilient Teams, we encouraged founders and future founders to treat mistakes as data points for learning and growth, and not setbacks. Since Melissa and I are both very practical-minded professionals, we dedicated a significant part of the agenda to group exercises.
We introduced two practical tools that founders could reflect on in small groups and introduce to their teams later on:
Blameless post-mortems – A structured reflection tool that helps teams analyze what went wrong, why, and how to improve—without placing blame. Participants worked in small groups to practice analyzing a hypothetical failure, learning how to extract insights without focusing on blame or punishment.
Celebrating mistakes – Normalizing failure through team rituals (such as “Failure Fridays” or “Lessons Learned Walls”) creates an open culture where experimentation is encouraged, not penalized. We asked participants to brainstorm ways to integrate mistake-sharing into their teams, resulting in ideas like monthly “Oops & Insights” sessions and peer-to-peer learning reflections.
The goal? To equip founders with simple, actionable ways to build cultures of resilience and innovation.
The Most Meaningful Feedback - from a 18-year-old
Once we had finished facilitating the MasterClass, our youngest participant, an 18-year-old student, waited for us. She shared:
“This workshop made me more optimistic about my future. I don’t feel stuck anymore.”
She had been home-schooled and now faced the overwhelming decision of what to study next. Like many young people, she feared making the wrong choice—but after the session, she saw mistakes not as something to be feared, but as part of growth.
She asked for our advice. Our response was unanimous:
Get a business degree—but more importantly,
Do internships. Lots of them.
Test different paths, learn, make mistakes, pivot, and move on.
She left with a different outlook: her choices were no longer traps, but experiments. And that shift in mindset is exactly why reframing mistakes matters.
Photo by MasterClass participant Muhammad Tana
cultural perspectives on mistakes
During our MasterClass, Melissa highlighted how in many Gulf and Levant cultures, mistakes are rarely discussed openly—there’s a strong emphasis on “saving face”. Failure can be seen as a loss of credibility rather than an opportunity for learning.
This cultural inclination can lead to a reluctance to openly discuss or admit mistakes, as doing so might be perceived as a loss of credibility or a source of shame. Such attitudes can hinder open communication and the sharing of lessons learned from failures.
Yet, the most successful founders—and the most dynamic economies—are the ones that embrace mistakes as data. Dubai embodies this ethos: if a project doesn’t work, the emirate pivots, repackages, and tries again. Sharjah takes a different approach, laying stronger foundations to avoid mistakes in the first place.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) as a whole has mastered the balance between these two forces—experimentation and tradition, speed and sustainability. But there are differences - nuances. For example, even though they are neighbouring emirates, Sharjah and Dubai did not chose the same (growth) path.
Dubai and Sharjah: Contrasting Growth Narratives
Melissa’s comments made me reflect on the larger narrative of growth in the UAE. The Emirates have taken very different approaches to growth and risk, much like how individuals and companies approach failure.
Dubai is like the buoyant younger brother—fast, risk-taking, and constantly reinventing itself. Since the 1990s, it has transformed from a regional trade hub into a global economic powerhouse, embracing bold initiatives, foreign investments, and high-risk, high-reward strategies (Oxford Business Group). In Dubai’s world, mistakes are part of the price of ambition.
Sharjah, in contrast, is like the older, wiser sister—measured, deeply rooted in education, culture, and sustainability. Historically, Sharjah had a stronger reputation for education and intellectual leadership in the Gulf. It was home to the first school in the UAE in 1953, the first library in 1925, and today, the Sharjah Book Authority is positioning the emirate as a knowledge hub (Oxford Business Group).
But Sharjah’s approach to growth isn’t just about academia—it’s about curating thought and expression. The Sharjah Art Biennial, founded in 1993, is one of the most influential cultural events in the region. While Dubai is known for its commercial dynamism, Sharjah has taken the role of intellectual and artistic custodian, nurturing conversations on identity, history, and creativity (Oxford Business Group).
Dubai pushes boundaries. Sharjah preserves, refines, and ensures longevity. Neither is “right” or “wrong.” They are simply two different ways of writing a story.
Owning the Narrative of Failure
Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi’s words - “It is important that we write our own stories” - apply to startups just as much as nations. The way we frame failure, acknowledge mistakes, and learn from them defines long-term success.
If Dubai had let fear of failure hold it back, it wouldn’t be the global city it is today. If Sharjah had ignored its intellectual and cultural strengths, it wouldn’t be the steady, trusted leader in education and the arts it is today.
The same goes for founders. Your failures don’t define you—how you write the next chapter does. And, as we learned at SEF, you are never too young to start seeing mistakes as part of the process.
How do you reframe mistakes in your business or industry?
Sources:
All in the text, mostly pertaining to the different economic development paths taken by Dubai and Sharjah.