I think failure is good for us as individuals. As a generation that received participant ribbons and trophies for everyone on the house-league soccer team, I think a lot of effort went into making sure we didn’t suffer the pain of losing too harshly as children. While I see the benefits, I also believe that protecting us from failure doesn’t do us any favours as adults.
Failure is not the same thing as making a mistake. A mistake means looking back after the outcome and wishing you had made a different choice; failure means that you strove for something and didn’t achieve it. I see this as a very important distinction because I think a lot of us have a tendency to look at our failures and call them mistakes. Do you regret applying for the job just because you didn’t get it? The process of trying is important in and of itself, and we can’t look back with 20/20 hindsight and say, “Oh, I should have known better.” You made the best decision you could with the information you had at the time, and once you have different information, you have an opportunity to make a different decision.
Failure is an opportunity to adjust or redirect, and for young people at the very beginning of our adult lives, the stakes are fairly low. We don’t own homes, support families, or have a lot of people counting on our successes except for ourselves. We’re not far enough along any particular path that it would be life altering to adjust our direction, which means that we have options. Our failures are opportunities to choose something different, or persevere and try again, and most importantly to learn something.
First and foremost, failure teaches us that failing is not the end of the world. We learn more from our failures because they force us to reconsider what we’re doing and examine our priorities. We worked for this thing that we didn’t get; now what? Do we really even want it?
Whatever the situation, we can get through it, and I think this makes us more willing to try new things. Once you have failed, and you come out okay on the other side, failure isn’t so scary because you know that you can handle it. Avoiding failure just makes it scarier, and is ultimately a reductionist way to live. Don’t limit yourself to only doing what you already know.
The generation before us was told that they would never own their own homes; that they were destined to a lifetime of mortgage payments. For most people, that prediction turned out to be false. I’ve been told that our generation should “give up” on finding full-time, permanent employment; that we’re doomed to a lifetime of contract positions. And that’s IF we can get a job right out of school! These prophecies of failure contribute to our fear of reaching for things, and one of our strengths as new graduates and young adults should be our optimism, our idealism, and our fresh perspective that all have yet to be dulled by “the real world.”
The contribution of the participant ribbon to our collective psyche around failure teaches us that we deserve recognition just for trying. As adults, this isn’t really the case—our work is more valued for its content than just for the fact that it exists. This concept also levels the playing field of achievement a little too much, so those who actually succeed are recognized less. I would argue that failure makes success sweeter. The struggle towards achievement makes you appreciate an accomplishment more because it’s been earned, not just given to everyone who tried.
As university students, we are threatened by failure. It means dropping the course, or failing the course; it means taking an extra semester; it means delaying the start of our “real” lives after education. I would argue that the fear of failure motivates us more than necessarily the desire to succeed. How many times have we accepted a 50 because “at least I passed,” instead of striving for the 80? We learn to accept a non-failure instead of an earned success.
I was always a student who was used to being rewarded for my work. I didn’t need to work particularly hard or challenge myself to achieve high marks in high school, and these habits carried over to university. One of my first university assignments came back with a grade of 60 per cent and a note that I hadn’t properly completed the assignment. This was the first academic failure I had encountered—some people wouldn’t count a 60 as a dramatic failure, but then again failure is relative.
Over the course of the semester, I learned what my professor meant. When I was given the chance at the end of the course to revise my work, I could see that my initial analysis was general, broad, and engaged only on a surface level. If I had gotten an 80 on that assignment from the outset, I likely wouldn’t have paid attention to how I could improve; I would have kept doing what I was doing, coasting along with my broad-strokes analysis, and not learning how to critically look at what I was saying and how I was saying it. I learned a huge amount from just that small failure, and that course turned out to be one of the things that inspired me about my degree.
If we allow ourselves to be defeated by failures, to give up and settle for less than what we want, that is a mistake. Failure can enrich our lives if we choose to view it as an opportunity to learn, to adjust, and re-prioritize so that when we do succeed, we can take a moment to appreciate that we worked for it and that we earned it, and to respect ourselves for that.