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never any solid playing time. I was timid and afraid of messing up in front of my whole school. It began to show in my game. I became very quiet and kept to myself. It didn’t help that my team didn’t believe in me but I let my negativity affect my game. After the first few games, I didn’t play much. The excitement about me had vanished and I was just the ball boy to most of my teammates. The year ended with a second place finish in the final. Being on the bench gave me a lot to think about. I didn’t even know if I would play the next year. But when the school year ended and the summer began I took last season and used it to my advantage. There was a new coach and I was determined to make the starting eleven come game one. I worked hard all summer going to camps, improving my overall game and boosting that confidence up. So when tryouts came, the new coach liked what he saw and sure enough, I was starting game one of my sophomore season. To make it even better, I scored the first goal of the year after sitting the bench my entire freshman season. If I had stayed angry about my first season it wouldn’t have done any good. I would have been the same player as the year before, but I decided that wasn’t how it was going to go, and through hard work and determination I turned my failure of freshman year into a successful sophomore campaign.
There are also times when people expect success but are greeted with failure. My last season of high school track and field was supposed to be the year that I finally became the captain of the track and field team. Everything seemed lined up for me to become the captain. I felt as though I had shown it in practice as well as in how I conducted myself on and off the track. We were never told who was captain in private so when my coach announced during the stretching session who would be captain I watched as my fellow seniors' names were called up to the front. Then I heard a junior’s name and then I heard the girls' captains, but not my name. I was shocked. How could a junior become a captain over me, especially since I was the veteran of the team and had been doing track longer than anyone else there? It really hit hard for many reasons. I really thought this would be given to me, and instead it was taken from me. I failed on something I thought I was going to be successful with. My coaches did talk to me saying they were sorry, but they just didn’t think I had it in me to captain the team. This fueled me through the season to prove not only to myself that I deserved it but also to my coaches. If I couldn’t be captain officially then I would be captain through my performances and how I acted during practices.
Failure comes at a time when we least expect it. It can come when we're happy and when we're sad. The key to success is harnessing failure to do good for you. These instances of failure don’t dictate what will happen in the long run. Do not let it take you over. Instead, use it as fuel to go forward to make you a successful person. Even people at the top of their game have failure. It’s part of being a human, we make mistakes but it’s how we learn from them and move on the help us grow as people. In my own personal experience, it really helps to use failure as fuel towards success. There have been times where I have been inclined to give up and not keep going but it’s that fuel inside that drives me toward success. There are instances in life where failure will dictate a lot but it’s how you learn from that failure that will help you succeed. It may not come easily, but success has a way of finding you and if you work hard enough, success will come into your life even when failure occurs.
Works Cited
Catmull, Ed. "Fear and Failure." Creativity: A Reader for
Writers. Ryan G. Van Cleave. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2015. 139. Print.
Davis, Jim. "Brock Holt’s Unusual Path to Red Sox
Stardom - The Boston Globe." BostonGlobe.com.
Boston Globe. 07 July 2015. Web. 04 Oct. 2016.