Reclaim failure

Business suits and interview folios descend upon campus as the most recent interview season begins—this one largely for summer consulting and finance positions. A glimpse into last week’s Career Fair yields a room crowded with well-dressed students eagerly networking with resumes in hand. To obtain a prestigious summer internship is the first step on the path toward post-graduation success. The scene is not an unfamiliar one, but it raises questions about prevailing notions of “success” and its converse: failure.

To be successful, as unofficially defined in the campus and broader social lexicon, is to find oneself on a well-worn track. We have written before about the gravitation toward pre-professional paths and the “Big Four” careers—law, medicine, consulting and banking—for their designated prestige and financial reward. As a student, the metric for success lies in the number of accomplishments, titles and accolades brimming from the resume page that guides one toward not just a job upon graduation but a three-digit paycheck. Yet, if success is working toward prestige, failure is straying from these well-beaten paths. In this model, choosing to take a summer to work to pay tuition or to replenish by pleasure reading, rather than landing the right internship, can be seen as failure.

Yet, such a dichotomous understanding of success and failure is narrow and limited. In her talk to students earlier this month, Sarah Lewis challenged the misconceptions surrounding failure. On one hand, our society is rarely exposed to the failure of its most iconic and celebrated—indeed “successful”—figures. Martin Luther King Jr.—renowned civil rights advocate who changed history through the power of his voice—according to Lewis, in fact received a C in his college oratory class. It is a fact that most history books omit. Yet, hiding such setbacks creates an aura of effortless perfection that petrifies those locked within its veneer. Fear of personal failure where others sail effortlessly to success paralyzes us against taking risks and exploring unconventional passions.

To re-conceptualize failure, then, is to embrace it as fuel and inspiration. It is a paradigm shift away from “minimizing the bad and upping the good” to understanding that, oftentimes, failure is necessary for success.

Yet still, embedded within this duality is an implicit complacency in avoiding failure and settling for success. In Lewis’ terms, we should strive not simply for “success” but, rather, “mastery.” Her message, transposed to the college landscape, might look like this: not just memorizing equations for an exam to be forgotten the next day but, rather, genuinely learning and understanding how they function. Delving deeply into a major rather than spreading thin attempting to force together multiple majors and certificates and minors. Immersing oneself genuinely in four courses and selected co-curricular activities rather than overloading in and outside the classroom.

In the words of Robert Frost, we should consider taking “the road less traveled.” After all, failure, in many ways, is intrinsic to who we are. Brene Brown discusses the difference between guilt and shame: Guilt is thinking, "I have failed," whereas shame is thinking, "I am a failure." One is a single event—a learning moment that can galvanize rather than render helpless; one that teaches us how to yield a better outcome next time and reminds us of our fundamental humanness. The other, a problematic tendency to allow failure to define us. As students, we must reclaim failure and change the way we speak about and understand it.