Successful Failure
Chris Parenteau
Failure is the enemy to success but without failure there is no success. The world that I live in is a world that judges everybody for everything. It’s a world where failing is rarely seen as a positive occurrence. To fail is to lose, and to most people losing is unacceptable. At a young age people are taught that failing is bad and should be avoided when possible. In school, to fail a class or test was (at the time) the end of the world. Falling off the bike or learning to pass the soccer ball for the first time always started with failure. If you did not fail then you would be perfect, and in this day and age nobody is perfect. People are good at different things and have strengths and weaknesses in different areas. Where they fail in one spot they prosper in another. Being afraid of failure is why most people never try new things or venture out of their comfort zone. But it is when people are not comfortable and not afraid of failing where growth occurs. Personally I have found more growth in my own life from failure than I would have ever thought I would. There have also been times in my life where I let the fear of failure affect me and bring me down. Ed Catmull’s “Fear and Failure” discusses the questions and answers about how different people and companies navigate the sea that is failure and how they obtain success when failure occurs. These instances of failure cannot just be defined by the action of failing but more on how the failure created success.
“For most of us, failure comes with baggage – a lot of baggage” (Catmull 139). Being afraid of what the aftermath of failure will cause is why most of us do not try new things. Just this past year was my senior track season. There was a lot of expectations on my shoulders from doing well in my indoor season to my previous records on the record board. I was an established athlete of the team. Now, my first few meets were not so good, I was doing much worse than what everyone was expecting of me and it was showing. My coaches were harder on me in practice. My teammates were supportive, but I could tell they were just trying to be nice. Catmull is completely right when he says failure comes with baggage, it’s a real burden to fail. Failing at the beginning of the season actually helped me and motivated me to do better. By the end of the season I was back to my winning ways helping the team to second place at the State Championship meet. Now I could have let my early struggles put me down but I used my failure as motivation to do better and I did just that.
Successful people didn’t just get to where they are overnigh. Being successful is a lot of work and takes a lot of work prior to the success. It’s what happens before someone becomes successful that defines their own success. Michael Jordan is one of, if not the best, basketball players to ever play the game, a Hall of Famer who happens to have a very successful line of shoes. Michael Jordan did not start out this way. As a high schooler, Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. If Jordan had let this define him, we may never have seen him play pro. He has a famous quote that says, “I've failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.” Everybody starts somewhere and every triumph begins with failure. Brock Holt of the Boston Red Sox began as a minor leaguer with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Nobody believed he would be a big star, so when he was brought up to the Red Sox to play almost every position on the field, he thrived. He did whatever it took to be able to play the game he loved (Speier).
Nobody likes to fail, it’s not fun to fail and when we fail it doesn’t feel particularly good. “We need to think about failure differently. I’m not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth” (Cattmull 139). For me, this all started four years ago when I was only a freshman in high school. Coming into my freshman soccer season, I had just come back from a camp that stressed the idea of confidence. I was beaming with confidence the first day of tryouts, and this confidence carried me throughout the two-week process and at the end to the shock of almost everybody I made Varsity soccer as a freshman. Although I made the team I didn’t expect to play much and my coach even told me the team was very deep and had a lot of older talent, which I understood. With the season underway, we were winning games by big margins, which meant I would get to play. I would get ten minutes here and ten minutes there, but
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