Failure Is Feedback. The Silence Was the Answer All Along.

Years ago, after submitting an RFP (Request for Proposal) and hearing nothing for months, I finally got the generic rejection email everyone dreads.

So I did what every business article tells you to do. I asked for feedback. We wanted to know what we’d done wrong, or more honestly, whether it was worth submitting again. No response came, not that week or the next.

I waited two weeks and tried again, and got the same silence back.

I was new to the RFP process at the time, so I did what people do when they don’t get an answer: I built one out of guesses. Maybe they never got my email. Maybe they were still reviewing things internally. Maybe one more week would change something.

I never heard back, and for a long time I treated that silence as a problem I hadn’t solved yet, instead of an answer I didn’t want to accept.

That’s the part I got wrong. The silence wasn’t a gap waiting to be filled. It was the feedback, and I just didn’t want to read it that way, because reading it that way meant admitting something I already knew.

You already know what you’re not built for

I teach at a design university, and every so often I watch a colleague present research that took years to build. I get curious, a little envious even, and the thought creeps in: maybe I should take on a long research project too.

Then I remember who I am. I’m impatient, and I want to test an idea fast and get data even faster.

When I wrote research papers in university, I’d land on my conclusion first and then go hunting for sources to back it up, which is backward, and I knew it was backward even while I was doing it.

So when I ask myself whether a long, open-ended research project is the right move for me, I already know the answer.

Not because I’m incapable of the work, but because I’m wired for action rather than patience, and pretending otherwise would just delay the moment I’d quit anyway.

I’d already given myself that feedback years before I started asking the question out loud.

Looking busy isn’t the same as being right

When I started my own architecture practice, my strategy for RFPs was simple: submit to everything.

More attempts, better odds, or so I assumed.

What I got instead was a string of rejections with no explanation, which is its own kind of frustrating, because at least a bad reason gives you something to argue with.

After enough of these, I finally got someone to agree to a debrief, and a committee member walked me through our actual score next to the other firms. It wasn’t close, not even in the same range as the firms who’d won.

The long hours we’d put in, the work our consultants had done, none of it mattered, because we simply didn’t have experience in the type of project they were hiring for. We weren’t in the competitive pool at all.

That’s the part that stings.

Working hard on the wrong project feels productive right up until someone shows you the scorecard, and by then the hours are already spent.

Effort doesn’t fix a mismatch between what you have and what they need; it just delays the moment you find out the mismatch was there all along.

No response is still a response

This is the one I find hardest to accept, because I genuinely like feedback.

How is anyone supposed to improve without knowing what they did wrong? That logic works fine for a kid learning multiplication tables, but it falls apart in professional life, where the correction you’re waiting for usually never comes wrapped in an explanation.

It comes wrapped in silence instead.

I recently talked to a contact who works as an HR director at a large company, and she told me something that reframed this for me. Companies don’t withhold feedback from rejected candidates only because they’re busy, though that’s part of it. They withhold it because giving specific reasons opens them up to lawsuits, so silence is the safer legal position, and silence is what they choose.

Once I heard that, the silence stopped feeling like an oversight and started feeling like a decision.

The decision made by someone, somewhere, who’d weighed the cost of telling me the truth and decided it wasn’t worth the risk.

Final thought

Failure is hard to sit with, and failure without an explanation is worse, because some part of you keeps waiting for the door to open.

But once you stop treating silence as an unanswered question and start treating it as the answer, you can finally ask the only question that actually matters: did I do the wrong thing, or did I do the right thing the wrong way?

I’m still tempted to follow up a fifth time on that old RFP, just to see what happens. At this point, the only feedback I’d be collecting is on my own persistence, and I’m fairly sure I already know what that one says too.