Hey there. Orianna here from Fortune.

Failure doesn’t usually feel like a gift. But sometimes it’s the thing that pushes you into the room you were never planning to enter.

Take Chanel’s chief people and chief organization officer, Claire Isnard, for example. She can trace her 40‑year career—and 17 years at the top of the luxury fashion house—back to one bad exam. Had she passed, she’d likely still be in a classroom, marking essays on Italian literature.

Looking back, in her first-ever sit-down interview with a journalist ahead of her retirement, Isnard tells me she still remembers that career-defining-yet-crushing moment.

“Not only I failed,” Isnard says, “but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had no clear path ahead of me. I had no clear goal.”

With no plan B, she went back to school and threw herself into student forums and networking events. It led to a chance encounter that would drag her from the classroom into consulting—and eventually, right into Chanel’s corner office.

It’s why, although it may not feel like it in the moment, she says that a “roadblock” could actually be a blessing in disguise.

“It hurts, it’s very uncomfortable. It can be very frustrating because you worked hard,” Isnard says. But it’s also an opportunity to reassess the direction you’re going down, as well as whether you’re even enjoying it.

“There is a signal here that either you’ve not worked enough—if you really want to do it again, work harder, and you will get it—or maybe there was something that was not for you,” she explains.

“Look at what you enjoyed in doing that, but also look at the thing you don’t enjoy, and go where your passion is… I’m really convinced that we cannot be good at something we don’t like doing.”

At the time, Isnard took her career plan to be a teacher “very, very seriously" and was already enjoying a brief taste of giving language lessons to teenagers in both Italy and France while studying, which made the final exam failure that would have cemented a lifelong academic career all the more painful.

But that detour changed everything. Despite having zero formal HR credentials, Isnard went on to help steer Chanel’s people strategy through a period of massive expansion, including tripling its workforce to 38,400 employees across 70 countries.

And as she ends the year—and her Chanel chapter—on the brink of retirement, she’s once again choosing to see uncertainty as possibility.

Read the full exclusive interview out now, in Fortune–including the brutal question that led to her getting poached by Chanel and her upcoming retirement plans.

P.S. We’re taking a two-week holiday pause, but we will be back in January with more exclusive interviews and insider tips to level up your success in the year ahead.

—Orianna Rosa Royle
Success Associate Editor, Fortune

Got a career tip or dilemma? Get in touch: orianna.royle@fortune.com. You can also find me on Linkedin: @oriannarosa.