Bulldozer Approach To A Marathon Analysis

Clayton Christensen’s book, “How Will You Measure Your Life?” gives an example of Clayton building a Treehouse with his kids. Every piece was put together with his children. They meticulously and slowly hammered each nail. After it was finished, he noticed his children didn’t use it much. They did show their friends what they built and how they built it, and the story of them building it together. He learned that the journey and the accomplishment of building it together was worth more than the outcome. I remember a time when my manager told me to slow down and enjoy the journey. I felt she was missing the bigger picture. I could not fathom slowing down. I didn’t understand what that meant since my goals were to achieve a certain level of income and an accumulation of things by specific ages. These goals were my measure of success that I made it in life. I was a glory seeker with a need for approval and validation. I was single, and extremely motivated to create my destiny. I lacked the grounding of an integrated life. I didn’t make much time for friends and my community. I was the one who always arrived to work early and stayed late. Enmeshed in a struggle on behalf of some ideal. One night at 7pm, a leader asked if I had too much to do or nowhere to go. I answered, “Both.” My priorities were in the wrong place. My values needed to change. Failure and loss would help me to re-center and re-balance my approach and methods. Failure creates radical self-understanding and is

First, Duckworth argues that a growth mindset transforms failures into learning opportunities that make individuals achieve more. In Grit, Duckworth tells a story about David, one of her students whose growth mindset helped him become increasingly successful. Duckworth saw his desire to learn and immediately asked for him to be placed in an accelerated course that provided more challenges and failures. When asked about how he dealt with these new failures, David responded that “I did feel bad - I did - but I didn’t dwell on it. I knew I had to focus on what to do next. I basically tried to figure out, you know, what I did wrong. What I needed to do differently” (Duckworth 19). David’s approach to obstacles in class allowed him to achieve greater things in the future. He later graduated from Swarthmore College and earned a PhD in mechanical engineering from UCLA. David learned from his mistakes, and

I worked just as hard, yet my test results were notably underwhelming in comparison to my ‘top 10’ classmates. What was different about me, I thought every night before I fell asleep. Then I realized, I was alone in my cherishment of extracurricular activities. While my classmates were up late Friday nights studying, I was cheering on the sidelines, exerting myself to pep up the crowd via backflips. When others were reading ahead, I was helping to feed outlying communities. While the ‘top 10’ was still cramming, I was at a Wednesday worship program. I’m committed to giving my complete impetus to everything I take part in, and sometimes, your best isn’t enough for what you want and there is almost nothing you can do about it. This taught me that in order to be truly fulfilled, you need to accept failure as part of your life and learn to move on. Thinking about it, I would not be happier if I quit doing the things I love to study more so that I could be in the ‘top 10’. In fact, I would most definitely be more miserable. Learning to accept failure, I have decided to cultivate my energy into simply giving my all and to welcome whatever rank, or not, I receive with open

Charley Goddard who is 15 cannot wait to participate in the Civil War! He is so pumped up that he lies about his age so that he can join the military. Firstly, Charley is bored at being in the military. But, just when he starts to think about leaving to go back to his home with his family, the gets a call for deployment. Soonly after, Charley goes at his first battle, The Battle of Bull Run. At The Battle of Bull Run, Charley finds a buddy killed by an opponent, and watches many other humans die. After fighting this battle, Charley has found that he does not care for war.. In the second battle, he is stunned to find him acting like a bear killing and shooting others. He's even more stunned to find someone crying when another stranger opponent

When I look at the word failure I didn’t see success. But that slowly changed as I read the book What the Best College Students Do by Ken Bain Chapter four. Bain, for me and I’m sure many other, have changed our view point on failure being a bad thing. He instead expressed failure as an “opportunity to learn something.” (121) As infants we grow and develop, we learn to walk by falling down a couple hundred times, and we learn to speak by babbling. By trying to walk, and trying to talk, we may fail at first. As an infant, you cannot give up when you are face to face with failure. You must get up and try again to learn. In the book, What the Best College Students Do by Ken Bain he uses people’s experiences and research to explain why failure is an opportunity to learn something new, rather than seeing failure as something bad. He asserts “people who become highly creative and productive learn to acknowledge failures, even to embrace them, and to explore and learn from them.” (100) Failure is important. If we did not get up and try again as infants, we would not be where we are today.

Though separated by two hundred and seventy-two years, the battles of Marathon and Cannae have much in common. Firstly, both battles employed the Pincer Maneuver, in which an army attacks both sides of the enemy formation in a movement similar to pinching. Miltiades and Hannibal extemporized brilliant tactics when they forwent the traditional blocked phalanxes to instead surround their opponent’s force, and Hannibal elevated this process with his strategic choreography of a feigned retreat in order to goad the Romans into the center of his attack and consequently, their doom. Both battles were of the ‘David and Goliath’ variety, and the end result of them was the same as the Biblical battle—the much stronger, larger, and in general more

Thomas Edison -- the inventor of the light bulb -- failed 1,000 times before perfecting his design. Why should we raise a young person, a student no less, to a higher standard than America’s greatest inventor? The nation pushes people forward, telling each individual that they are not allowed to be unsuccessful. This causes a multitude of people unnecessary stress; there is no longer a “good enough,” one could always do better. However, one shouldn’t be required to always do better; according to Zinsser, we need to “take a hundred side trips . . . Faltering, drawing back, and starting again” in order to find our purpose. “Failure” isn’t a dreadful word -- it is a valuable one that holds no venom in its

The goal of wanting to succeed is quite natural for everyone. It is not unjust to assume that all students want to become successful as well. However, some students are more determined to succeed than others and take extreme steps to do so. Richard Rodriguez’s The Scholarship Boy discusses the issue with scholarship students. He argues the overachieving student has an eager obsession with learning. Although Rodriguez addresses the scholarship boy obsession with success, he fails to describe the undergoing stress of the overachieving student.

I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos concerning BS things that most people do. And after spending half a day video marathon of these shatty video, I realized that humanity becomes worse and worse each day. Well, I know that some people out there are really doing their best to keep up with etiquettes, but the good guy – bad guy ratio comes in 1:1000. Like seriously, you get one pretty good guy over a thousand other douche bags.

I can relate to the above quote. During my first years of high school, I did not take my academics as seriously as I should have. I did not set goals so that I would not disappoint myself. I have learned my little decisions I made impacted my grade point average and class ranking. Also I realized I needed to make some academic changes.

As J.K. Rowling once said, “it is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.” As we end our high school career and make our way into the future, we must keep in mind all of the lessons we were taught at Anderson that will help us to succeed, even when we fail the first time. These messages, which were taught through books, will help form us as the young adults we are becoming.

Like when I did track, I wanted to jump at a minimum eleven feet so, I had to practice every day before I could actually do it, but I never gave up. Because of that, I can now soar more than eleven feet. If I would’ve given up I probably would not have enjoyed the meets and I wasn't embarrassed about how much I could jump. It wasn't the best jump, but I was content with it. I could also apply this lesson to simple problems on a daily basis. Like, when a teacher asks you to do something, try to figure it out, and after a couple mistakes don’t just say I give up just ask for help. Now, I’m learning to apply this to everyday things. I also learned that I should just keep trying. I’ve experienced the truth. I’ve done this by applying it to everyday

There are several qualities to have to be successful in college. These qualities can range from attending class to going above and beyond what’s expected. Success comes from the journey taken or the path chosen. Success also comes from being prepared. As a student, I must step up to the challenge and find the path to success along the way. Several ways I define success is to uphold academic integrity, have the ability to prioritize, and to motivate myself to stay on top of what needs to be accomplished.

So you might be wondering, if this all important, ground breaking concept is not learned by everyone concept isn’t learned by everyone, then how did I learn it? Well I learned it the same way anyone else would have, through failure, repeated, numerous, never-ending failure. But how is that possible, you have good grades, and seem to be fine. Well you are right, I haven’t gone through a serious world ending failure, well not exactly, but that is not what this essay is about though. I grew to be resilient from a much smaller, less stressful endeavor, a video game.

As my first semester of college is coming to an end, I would like to reflect on my experience here within the Honors 120 and 121 class on Failure and the Question Wheel. I chose this class on failure because I have always held myself to such high standards that I hoped to be able to find a way to accept failure in some instances. Within our first week in class, we made claims about failure. My favorite claim was that every failure is in some way a success. Although this claim was not very debatable and incredibly generic, I was able to really let my mind explore what it was trying to say. Throughout the semester I experienced failure after failure, but that allowed me to see that success can still be achieved within failures.