Why Failure Is a Better Teacher Than Success

I failed to reach the top of the rock climbing wall on the playground, and as a result, I have strived even harder to reach the peak of success in everything I do. Instead of becoming discouraged and disappointed in myself, I found a way to improve myself for my next challenge. Learning from my mistakes has molded me into an improved person while giving me the motivation to keep pushing forward. Failure has taught me the importance of learning from your errors and trying again, no matter how difficult it may be. Without lessons like these, I would not be the motivated, independent person that I am today. I will continue to fail and try again until I achieve my goal of reaching the

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.

When I was in grade 10, I used to be a player in my high school soccer team. In sport, there is a famous sentence that I’ve always remembered “You win some, you lose some” and it has changed the way I think about failure. For many people, “failure” means that we can’t achieve something that we’ve already set a goal for it. However, for me, failure is a thing that leads us to success.

Failure is something that all people encounter in their lives. In some situations failure can break a person or make a person, meaning a person can fail at something and just simply give up. Others will fail and that failure can give them the inspiration to try harder to one day achieve their goal. I'm the type of person to fail and work harder until I am content. As my championship baseball coach would say "What’s our motto? Never give up!"

Failure can be a very difficult thing to cope with. It can be something that makes you or breaks you. I have learned that failure is what defines a person; it shows your motivation to bounce back when things get rough. I have learned from my failure instead of dwelling on it and making myself weaker.

Sir Winston Churchill, a British politician from 1800’s says “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” Throughout my few years of living, I have learned that everybody is going to fail at something at least once. It is up to you to take all of your failures and turn them into success. It’s not going to only take one day but everyone is destined to be successful.

Failure is a part of life. While many see failure as a negative thing, I have started to see it as a situation that can make you a better person. Failure drives me to never make that mistake again. I first realized this when I took my first AP class and AP exam and received a score of 2. This journey all started sophomore year when I took AP World History. I quickly learned that I needed to actually read and take notes to be able to succeed in the class. It took a few poor grades on essays and tests for me to understand this. Despite this new revelation, I still struggled in the class. When it came time to start reviewing and preparing for the exam, I put an immense amount of effort, but not as hard as I should’ve been. Exam day came and

INTRODUCTION: “I have failed over and over again in my life and that is why I succeeded” a quote by Michael Jordan. How many of you believe failure is a prerequisite to success? , how many of you believe that the difficulties and obstacles you’ve faced changed who you are as a person? well, life is not a wish granting factory , it will feel long and tough , eventually at one point you will fail , we all do , but it’s not about failing it’s about how you perceive failure , that is what defines you as a person , Samuel Becket once

In addition, the willingness to learn through failure can help to reach the desired destiny. Nearly everybody fears failing, because it has been associated with all sorts of negativity. Although an optimistic look on the other side of tripping or falling down in life can make someone to be successful in

I believe Jimmy Connors best embodied my attitude toward failure in his iconic quote, “I hate to lose more than I love to win.” As someone who has actively participated in sports all throughout high school, as well as serving captain of the varsity football team this senior year, I am no stranger to Failure. As time goes on I have noticed the losses tend to stick more than the wins. I believe this is because of all the ‘what if’s that accompany failure. What if I had been a little bit faster? What if we didn’t drop that pass? What if we stopped that play? No matter the team, no matter how hard we played, every loss always left me with these same questions times 1000. However, no loss was more impactful than this year’s Thanksgiving day game

The article titled “How to help kids overcome fear of failure” by Vicki Zakrzewski made me think about failure in a new light. I chose this article because it is something I still need to learn myself. It is easy to think, “ I will be able to help coach my students about failure and help them see that it is okay to mess up and not be perfect”! When I have to take my own advice that is a different story. I do not take failure well. I have always put a lot of pressure on myself to succeed and hate it when I feel like I can’t do something well.

Most people view failure as a mistake and respond poorly they put themselves down and give up, but in reality failure is a life lesson and can help them make their life better in the future. I have experienced failure in soccer by not making the starting varsity team in my junior year. After a week of excruciating tryouts the coaches told me I was not going to get any time on varsity and gave me the option of being demoted to a starting junior varsity player. I was really upset because all my other friends had made varsity team except for me and I was really excited for the season and to play soccer at the varsity level for my high school. After thinking about the situation, I decided that I would rather work hard and develop my skills with

Failure is something that we cannot go through life without experiencing. The best thing about failure is that failure can be used as a great learning experience to improve upon things in our lives and career. Using failure as a learning tool is dependent upon the person and how they view it as well as how they use it. Failure is a matter of perspective and the lessons in failure are important aspects towards growth and development. If we did not experience failure there wouldn’t be opportunities for learning. Failure can teach us about ourselves as well as provide an understanding for our

Failure often times leads a person to feel helpless, disappointed and depressed. However,one should not allow this to set them back in trying to achieve the ultimate aim one has set out to do. Failure in the beginning can often be a powerful incentive to reassess one’s position in wanting to achieve the particular aims; to analyse whether the purpose is worth the trouble the person has to undergo and the whether the obstacles are surmountable.

Traditionally, failure is seen as a negative concept and is defined as lacking success. I, on the other hand, try to put a positive spin on everything in life. I see failure as an obstacle that is experienced by all, but it does not define an individual. Failure in essence will force an individual to be more receptive to their surroundings and actions and also will force an individual to mature. Looking back on my childhood years I can now pinpoint the areas where I failed and I can confidently say that I have grown and prospered due to those failures. The three major failures I have experienced were my attention deficit issues which affected my ability to succeed in school, my anti-social habit that I let consume my early years, and my