I was watching a TED video the other day about the concept of MESH businesses. The speaker was Lisa Gansky, the author of the new book, The Mesh: Why The Future of Business Is Sharing. If you think about it MESH businesses have been around for a while: hotels, rental car companies, transportation, and now music and video sharing. Although I find the concept to be intriguing, what interested me most was the idea of sharing failures. Gansky touched on this briefly in her talk, saying that by sharing failures we don''t repeat them.This got me thinking about how often we talk about failure. How many times have you failed at something and shared it with others? Now think about how many times you''ve succeeded at something and shared your experience. Along the way, everyone has failed at some point. So wouldn''t it be great if we could share our failures so that others don''t repeat them. It got me thinking that someone should create a website that is divided up into different categories (personal, career, family, etc). People can then go on and share the mistakes they''ve made and what they could''ve done differently so the next person can circumvent the same issue."You learn from your mistakes" is something I''ve always heard, but what if I want to prevent problems before they actually happen. When Gansky first mentioned sharing failures, I automatically thought of when I''m assigned a second edition of a book. In this case it makes sense to read the reviews of the first edition, to see what readers liked and didn''t like, what worked and what didn''t. By knowing what went wrong on the first go around, I''m able to fix the problems for the newest release. This made me start to think that other peoples mistakes might be just as important as my own.All of the above sounds well and good, but before we share our failures we first have to accept them. If we change the way we view failure maybe fessing up to it wouldn''t be so hard. If failure wasn''t negative it would be a lot easier to face. That''s where the idea of sharing comes into play. If we know that we could potentially help others by talking openly about what''s gone wrong then maybe failure doesn''t have to be such an earth shattering concept.