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The Positive Power of Failure

• Vijay Govindarajan

This post is part of HBR’s special issue on failure. This post was written with Mark Sebell and Jay Terwilliger, managing partners at Creative Realities, Inc. a Boston-based innovation management collaborative. There are three variables in the innovation equation: Innovation = ƒ(Strategy + Creativity + Execution) The need to experiment and fail inexpensively in Execution […]

This post is part of HBR’s special issue on failure .

• Vijay Govindarajan is the Coxe Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, an executive fellow at Harvard Business School, and faculty partner at the Silicon Valley incubator Mach 49. He is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. His latest book is Fusion Strategy: How Real-Time Data and AI Will Power the Industrial Future . His Harvard Business Review articles “ Engineering Reverse Innovations ” and “ Stop the Innovation Wars ” won McKinsey Awards for best article published in HBR. His HBR articles “ How GE Is Disrupting Itself ” and “ The CEO’s Role in Business Model Reinvention ” are HBR all-time top-50 bestsellers. Follow him on LinkedIn . vgovindarajan

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The Benefits of Failure

Failure can increase resilience and spur creativity, among other advantages..

Posted November 10, 2021 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

• What Is Resilience?
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• Our society is so competitive and focused on winning that we sometimes overlook the silver linings of failure.
• Failure can spur creativity and innovation, as well as conferring other benefits.
• Everyone can learn from failure, improving their resilience to the setbacks they will inevitably encounter in life.

We live in a competitive society that has big winners and big losers. Educators, motivation experts, life coaches, sports psychologists, and other mentors mainly teach us how to approach success, how to be winners. Few teach us a much more valuable lesson—how to cope with failure.

A society that worships winners tends to make horrible choices, whether considered from a moral or a practical perspective. Consider the widespread practice of preferring job applicants with a near-perfect grade point average over those with more varied scores.

The conventional view is that someone with a near-perfect GPA will become a near-perfect employee. Yet, there is a glaring flaw in this reasoning. A straight-A student is not a perfect person but someone who has never done badly in a course. This means that they have never really been tested. If they have not been tested to the extent of receiving at least some weak grades, then they have also missed out on learning to cope with failure. Such individuals tend to be perfectionists , and this trait is associated with diminished resilience in response to failure.

An untested employee is like an untried soldier, liable to break down under fire from real-world difficulties and challenges. Even if they do not fall apart emotionally, they tend to be rigid, narcissistic , and uncreative.

Although it might seem perverse to claim that prior failure is an advantage in a job candidate, contrary to the received wisdom of personnel recruiters, experiencing failure is actually the best qualification for any difficult occupation. Of course, the context matters, and we are discussing situations where the goal had been potentially achievable and not some inflated pipe dream. Also excluded are purely personal failures, such as alcoholism or criminal activities.

On a first impression , the young Theodore Roosevelt was described as a “second-rate intellect, first-rate temperament.” Roosevelt survived a long litany of failures in his life, from crashing out of politics to watching his cattle herd die.

Of course, Roosevelt’s failures were balanced by a staggering list of accomplishments, from founding the environmental movement, working for world peace, and tackling poverty in America to busting monopolies and leading the country out of the Great Depression . Not bad for a Republican one-term president.

So what are the advantages of experiencing failure?

People who fail repeatedly develop persistence in the face of difficulties. President Harry Truman was perceived as a flop during his own life but stuck to his guns when it really mattered, such as firing the popular but insubordinate General MacArthur. Thomas Edison is remembered for the incandescent light bulb, among many other key inventions in the Age of Electricity. He is said to have failed with a thousand different filaments before hitting on a material that worked.

Only people with extensive histories of failure could survive the difficulties that these individuals endured. Such dogged persistence is not a universal trait, of course. If it were, everyone would have a Ph.D.

With success, people keep on doing the same thing. When they fail, they are forced to adapt and change. That is not just a human characteristic but constitutes a basic feature of how the mammalian brain works. Research on monkeys found that when they were reinforced for looking in the correct direction, this action was more likely to be repeated . If they gave the wrong response, they were less likely to repeat it,

If a lab rat no longer gets rewarded for pressing a lever that had yielded food pellets before, it gets visibly upset. As its frantic efforts fail, it resorts to all manner of strange or novel reactions, from grooming itself to biting the lever or leaping into the air. It is learning that the world has changed and what had worked before no longer works.

When one combines emotionalism with originality, that is fairly close to what most people think of as artistic creativity . Artists are not necessarily frustrated people but tend to be dissatisfied with what they have accomplished previously and try to do something better or something new.

The magical power of failure is not restricted to the arts or to political leadership.

It applies to all fields of human endeavor, including the crass activity of financial money grubbing. Anyone who bought Apple stock when it was dirt cheap and made a lot of money learned nothing in the process. Those who bought at the peak and lost 40 percent of their stake are still scratching their heads. Like the rat in the experiment, they learned via failure. A bet that had worked well in the past may fail dismally in the future.

Never underestimate the magical properties of failure. It increases resilience in the face of unfavorable outcomes and gets the creative juices flowing.

Nigel Barber, Ph.D., is an evolutionary psychologist as well as the author of Why Parents Matter and The Science of Romance , among other books.

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Failure Is a Privilege

Billie Jean King , winner of 39 Grand Slam Tennis titles, said, “Losing a tennis match isn’t failure, it’s research.” Thomas Edison said he hadn’t failed, but rather “found 10,000 ways that don’t work” in his quest to invent a working lightbulb. These game-changing pioneers can extol the benefits of failure all they want. But most of us find failure unpleasant. It helps, I believe, to realize that there is a “right kind of wrong”—a type of failure that brings valuable advances in science, as well as in everyday life. Called “intelligent failures,” these are the undesired results of thoughtful forays into new territory. Intelligent failures illuminate the pathway toward success.

Failure can also be a privilege. As journalist and University of Colorado professor Adam Bradley points out in a New York Times article , “One of the greatest underrecognized privileges of whiteness might be the license it gives some to fail without fear.” Bradley explains that being a member of a minority culture often means your failures, especially if they become public, are seen as representative of an entire group. Your individual failure reflects badly on everyone else like you. John Jennings, professor of media and culture studies at the University of California, Riverside, told Bradley, “I want to get to the point where Joe Schmo Black guy is just safe, can be ordinary—even mediocre.”

Stereotyping is a natural psychological process that causes people to generalize the actions of an individual to their group. This is especially true when a group is underrepresented in a given field or role. Thus, when a person of color fails in a consequential role, people tend to overgeneralize, seeing the failure as related to their race rather than to them as an individual. Intuitively aware of this, members of minority groups feel heightened pressure to succeed, so as to avoid triggering these biases—a pressure that ironically inhibits their ability to perform well.

In fact, that inventor and acoustician James West , whose intelligent failures resulted in more than 250 patents, including one for the electret microphone, was African American makes his success that much more noteworthy. He succeeded in his field despite the entrenched racism that had him being mistaken for a janitor while employed as a scientist at Bell Labs. Imagine the pressure he must have felt to avoid reducing the chances for others like him to follow in his footsteps at Bell Labs and other elite institutions.

Read More: How Bell Labs Invented the World We Live in Today

Women, especially women in academic science, also lack the luxury of failing unobtrusively. We are at risk of feeling pressure to succeed at all times lest we spoil other women’s opportunities. Scientist Jennifer Heemstra endorses “a culture in science and academia where people can be open about their failures without consequences.” A realist, she adds, “I’ll say that our responsibility to share our failures is proportional to the amount of power we have in the academic system.” As a tenured professor with her own lab at Emory University, Heemstra is now quite open about her failures. But she wasn’t always that way. Her most painful failure—not being voted for tenure the first time around (at a previous university)—turned out to be a gift. The failure was an interruption, forcing reflection.

“[Failing a tenure vote] was definitely the most painful failure of my life, as I felt like I had let down my family and my research group members—basically all of the people I care most about,” explained Heemstra to information-technology researcher Veronika Cheplygina, who also studies failure. “But it can also be a beautifully humbling experience as well. Seeing how all of those people stood by me in the midst of the struggle ended up seismically shifting my worldview and priorities. It gave me a new view of what academia could be and a fire to make that into a reality.”

Note that Heemstra didn’t try to slough off or ignore what she calls “a truly horrible feeling.” She acknowledged and named her feeling and let herself feel bad for a time. This is in line with findings from a 2017 study led by psychologist and researcher Noelle Nelson that focusing on your emotions, rather than thinking about the failure (which tends to generate self-justification), helps people learn and improve. Eventually, Heemstra developed a keen interest in failure that led to research into understanding how undergraduates experience failure in STEM courses and how this affects their decision to continue science careers. She and others have designed an undergraduate research curriculum to engage students in hands-on laboratory learning and give them experience with the right kind of wrong that is so central to discovery.

Similarly, embracing failure is a mainstay in queer (LGBTQIA+) theory and politics. In his seminal book The Queer Art of Failure , transgender media theorist Jack Halberstam argues that the measure and meaning of success is not defined by the individual but rather comes from communities, and that the norms of “success” lead toward a “mindless conformity.” In contrast, embracing failure allows a “free space of reinvention” from which to critique assumptions imposed by the world. Halberstam is part of a group of queer thinkers who see the experience of failure to meet society’s expectations as foundational to queer culture. Mainstays of what it means to live a “successful” life, such as biological prosperity, financial security, health, and longevity, had long been denied to queer people by discriminatory adoption laws, biases in hiring, acts of violence and prejudice, and even the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In failing to live up to heteronormative expectations, queer people must find their own ways to “succeed,” and a core and now celebrated part of this success is the recognition of having first failed.

For instance, drag performance , as an art form, celebrates the experience of queer people welcoming a lack of conformity to society’s expectations. Through its exaggerated contrast, the show makes society’s default expectations more visible. It makes us aware of heteronormative culture as a lens through which we view the world—nudging us out of our default sense, as naïve realists, that we objectively see reality. In the competition reality-television show RuPaul’s Drag Race , a group of mostly male-identified contestants adopt characters who are pastiches of femininity in hyperbolic performances of models and pageant contestants. The show celebrates liberation from expectations on a prime-time stage. And it’s wildly popular. The premiere of its 13th season on January 1, 2021, was, at the time, the show’s most watched episode, garnering 1.3 million viewers via simulcast, a number comparable to the 1.32 million viewers who tuned in to an average NBA game during the 2020–21 season.

Read More: You Just Don’t Silence a Drag Queen

Cultivating psychological safety is not the same thing as cultivating belonging, and many have conflated the two in recent years. Here’s how I see it: Psychological safety, which means believing it’s safe to speak up, is enormously important for feeling a sense of belonging. But belonging is more personal, while psychological safety is more collective (it is conceptualized in research studies as an emergent property of a group) and, I think, it is co-created by individuals and the groups to which they wish to belong. The more I study the research on the psychology, sociology, and economics of inequality, the more massive the undertaking of correcting these societal failures feels. At the very least, as a society, we should aspire to creating a world where everyone has an equal license to fail intelligently. That is not the case today. But I believe that we’re ever so slightly closer to that aspiration than we were even just a few years ago. Recognizing our heteronormative, white lens through which we view the world is an important first step.

Excerpted from RIGHT KIND OF WRONG published by Atria, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © 2023 by Amy Edmonson.

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Essay on Failure Is The Stepping Stone To Success

Students are often asked to write an essay on Failure Is The Stepping Stone To Success in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Failure Is The Stepping Stone To Success

Introduction.

Failure is often seen as a bad thing. But, if we change our view, we can see it as a stepping stone to success. It’s a chance to learn and grow.

Learning from Mistakes

When we fail, we learn what doesn’t work. This helps us find what does work. We gain knowledge and experience from our mistakes.

Building Character

Failure also builds our character. It makes us strong and resilient. It shows us that we can face challenges and not give up.

Path to Success

So, failure is not the end. It’s the start of a journey to success. By learning and growing from our failures, we can reach our goals.

In conclusion, failure is a stepping stone to success. It’s an opportunity to learn, grow, and become stronger. So, don’t fear failure. Embrace it and keep moving forward.

250 Words Essay on Failure Is The Stepping Stone To Success

In life, everyone aims to be successful. But the road to success is not always smooth. We often face hurdles and sometimes, we fail. Yet, it is crucial to understand that failure is not the end. Instead, it is a stepping stone to success.

When we make mistakes, we learn what not to do. This is important because it helps us avoid the same mistakes in the future. For example, if a student fails in a test, he will study harder next time to pass. This is how failure acts as a stepping stone to success.

The Role of Persistence

Being persistent is key to overcoming failure. When we fail, we should not give up. Instead, we should try again with more determination. The story of Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb, is a great example. He failed thousands of times before he succeeded.

Turning Failure into Success

To turn failure into success, we need to have a positive mindset. We should view failure as an opportunity to learn and grow. By doing so, we can turn our failures into stepping stones towards success.

In conclusion, failure is not something to be feared. It is, in fact, a stepping stone to success. It teaches us valuable lessons, makes us persistent, and helps us grow. So, the next time you fail, remember that it’s not the end, but the beginning of a journey towards success.

500 Words Essay on Failure Is The Stepping Stone To Success

Life is full of ups and downs. It is not a smooth journey, but rather a path full of obstacles and challenges. One of the most important lessons we learn from life is that failure is not the end. In fact, it can be the stepping stone to success.

Understanding Failure

Failure is when we are unable to achieve our goals or meet our expectations. It is a part of life that everyone experiences at one point or another. It can be in school, at home, or in our daily activities. Failure can make us feel sad and disappointed. But we should not let these feelings stop us from trying again.

Learning from Failure

Each failure teaches us something. It shows us what doesn’t work and encourages us to find a different way to reach our goals. For example, imagine you are trying to ride a bicycle for the first time. You may fall down many times. But each fall teaches you something new. You learn how to balance, how to pedal, and how to steer. Eventually, you learn to ride the bicycle. In this case, each fall or failure was a stepping stone to your success.

Failure and Success

Failure and success are two sides of the same coin. To reach success, we must face and overcome our failures. Many famous people have faced big failures before they found success. Thomas Edison, a famous inventor, failed thousands of times before he invented the light bulb. He once said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” This shows that he saw each failure as a step closer to success.

Building Resilience

Facing failures can make us stronger. It builds our resilience, which is our ability to bounce back from difficult situations. When we fail, we have two choices. We can give up, or we can try again. By choosing to try again, we are building our resilience. We are showing that we are not afraid of failure. We are ready to learn from it and move forward.

In conclusion, failure is not something to be afraid of. It is a stepping stone to success. Each failure is a lesson that brings us closer to our goals. So, the next time you fail, do not be disheartened. Remember, it is just a stepping stone on your path to success. Embrace it, learn from it, and move forward with more determination. Success is waiting for you at the end of your journey.

This essay is a reminder that failure is not the end. It is just a part of the journey to success. So, don’t be afraid to fail. Embrace it, learn from it, and use it as a stepping stone to reach your goals.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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• Essay on Failure In School
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Ultimate Guide to Writing a College Essay about Failure

Writing about failure can be daunting, especially when it comes to college essays. Many students feel the need to present themselves as perfect, without flaws or mistakes. However, failure is a natural part of life and can often lead to growth and personal development. In this guide, we’ll explore how to write a college essay about failure and turn it into a powerful and compelling story.

1. Define what failure means to you

Defining what failure means to you is the first step in writing a college essay about failure. This involves taking some time to reflect on your personal experiences and how you perceive failure. Failure can mean different things to different people, and it's important to understand how you view it in order to effectively write about it.

Some people view failure as a setback or a defeat, while others view it as an opportunity for growth and learning. Some may see it as a necessary part of the journey towards success, while others may feel discouraged and demotivated by it. Whatever your perspective on failure may be, it's important to be honest with yourself and reflect on how it has impacted your life.

As you define what failure means to you, think about specific examples from your life that demonstrate your perspective. This could be a time when you failed to achieve a goal, made a mistake, or experienced a significant setback. Reflect on how you felt in that moment and how it affected you in the short and long term. This can help you better understand your relationship with failure and how you can write about it in a meaningful way in your college essay.

2. Choose the right experience to write about

When it comes to writing a college essay about failure, choosing the right experience to write about is crucial. You need to pick a failure that is significant enough to be interesting to the admissions officers, but also something that you are comfortable sharing.

One strategy is to think about a time when you failed to meet your own expectations, whether it was in school, in sports, or in your personal life. This kind of failure can be particularly powerful because it shows a willingness to take risks and set ambitious goals for yourself.

Another approach is to reflect on a time when you faced a difficult challenge or obstacle and were not able to overcome it. This could be a failure in an academic setting, such as a poor grade on an exam, or a failure in your personal life, such as the end of a relationship or a family conflict.

Whatever experience you choose, be sure to focus on the lessons you learned from the failure and how it has helped you grow and develop as a person. Admissions officers are looking for applicants who are self-aware, reflective, and able to learn from their mistakes.

3. Describe the experience in detail

When writing a college essay about failure, it is important to describe the experience in detail. This means not only discussing what happened, but also how you felt, what you learned, and how it has affected you.

One way to do this is to use descriptive language. Instead of simply stating what happened, try to paint a picture with your words. Use sensory details to help the reader visualize the experience and understand the impact it had on you.

For example, if you are writing about failing a test, don't just say "I got a bad grade." Instead, describe the feelings you had when you saw the grade, how it made you feel about yourself, and how it affected your motivation to do better in the future.

It is also important to be honest and authentic when describing the experience. Don't try to make yourself look better or downplay the impact of failure. Admissions officers want to see that you can reflect on your experiences and learn from them, even when things don't go according to plan.

Overall, by providing a detailed and honest description of your experience, you can help the reader understand how failure has shaped you as a person and why it is an important topic to write about in a college essay.

4. Reflect on what you learned

When writing a college essay about failure, it's essential to reflect on what you learned from the experience. It's not enough to merely describe the failure; you need to demonstrate how it impacted you and what you gained from it.

Start by examining the experience and what led to the failure. What were the circumstances that led to it, and what were your reactions? How did you feel at the time, and how did those feelings change over time? Did the failure have any long-term effects on you, or did it change the way you approach similar situations?

Next, think about what you learned from the experience. Did the failure reveal any weaknesses or blind spots in your skills or approach? Did it force you to confront any personal biases or beliefs? Did it teach you anything about resilience, perseverance, or risk-taking? Reflect on how the experience changed your perspective, and what you can do differently moving forward.

It's important to avoid falling into the trap of merely presenting the failure as a story with a tidy ending. Instead, use the essay as an opportunity to showcase your ability to think critically and reflectively. Admissions officers want to see that you have the capacity to learn and grow from your mistakes and that you can apply those lessons to future challenges. By demonstrating your ability to do so, you can turn a difficult experience into a powerful and persuasive essay.

5. Emphasize the positive

When writing about failure in a college essay, it's important to emphasize the positive aspects that came out of the experience. Admissions officers want to see that you learned from your failure and grew as a person.

Start by describing the positive things that came out of the experience. Did you gain a new perspective on something? Did you learn a valuable lesson? Did you develop a new skill? Highlighting the positives shows that you are able to take something negative and turn it into a positive.

For example, if you failed a test, you could talk about how you used that experience to improve your study habits and ultimately become a better student. Or if you failed to win a sports championship, you could discuss how you used that experience to become a better athlete, teammate, and leader.

Remember to focus on how you grew and what you learned from the experience, rather than dwelling on the negative aspects of the failure. This will show admissions officers that you are resilient, adaptable, and able to turn challenges into opportunities.

6. Be authentic

When writing about failure, it's important to be honest and authentic in your essay. Don't try to portray yourself as a perfect person who never fails because that's simply not true. Admissions officers are looking for authenticity in your writing, and they can often tell when an essay is insincere or embellished.

Instead, focus on being genuine and vulnerable in your essay. Share your real emotions and thoughts about the experience you're writing about. Talk about how it made you feel and what you learned from it. Share any insights you gained or how it has affected you since then. This will show the admissions officers that you are self-aware and able to reflect on your experiences, which are important qualities for any college student.

Remember that being authentic doesn't mean you have to overshare or be too personal. It's okay to set boundaries and not share every detail of your experience. The key is to strike a balance between being open and honest while still maintaining some privacy and dignity.

In addition, avoid using cliches or generic language in your essay. Instead, use specific details and examples to illustrate your points. This will make your essay more memorable and engaging to read.

Overall, being authentic in your essay will help you stand out from the crowd and show admissions officers that you are a real person with real experiences and insights to share.

Writing about failure in a college essay may seem daunting, but it can be an opportunity to showcase your personal growth and resilience. By defining what failure means to you, choosing the right experience, describing it in detail, reflecting on what you learned, emphasizing the positive, and being authentic, you can craft a powerful and effective essay that demonstrates your character and potential. Remember that failure is a part of life, and it's how you respond to it that matters most. Use this guide to approach your essay with confidence and authenticity.

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Essays on Power Failure

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Essay on Failure

Failure, a word often met with dread and disappointment, is, in reality, one of the most powerful tools for learning and growth. It is a universal experience that no individual, regardless of age, background, or career, can escape. This essay aims to dismantle the negative connotations surrounding failure, illustrating its inherent value and pivotal role in personal development and success. Tailored for students entering essay writing competitions, it offers a comprehensive exploration of failure’s multifaceted impact on our lives.

At its core, failure is a deviation from expected or desired outcomes. It is not an end, but rather a critical moment of reflection, providing invaluable insights into our actions, decisions, and goals. Understanding failure is essential for leveraging its potential as a catalyst for growth.

The Stigma of Failure

Society often stigmatizes failure, associating it with a lack of ability or effort. This perception instills fear, discouraging risk-taking and innovation. However, this view is fundamentally flawed as it overlooks failure’s role in fostering resilience, adaptability, and perseverance.

Failure as a Learning Opportunity

Every instance of failure is laden with lessons. It highlights our weaknesses, prompting us to confront and rectify them. Thomas Edison’s journey to inventing the light bulb, marked by numerous failures, exemplifies how repeated setbacks are essential steps towards achieving a breakthrough.

The Role of Failure in Innovation

Failure is the bedrock of innovation. The iterative process of trial and error is crucial for discovery and creativity. Many of the world’s most groundbreaking inventions were preceded by numerous failures, underscoring the importance of persistence and resilience.

Failure and Personal Growth

Failure shapes character, imbuing individuals with humility, empathy, and understanding. It teaches the value of hard work and the importance of perseverance. Personal growth often stems from navigating through failures, emerging wiser and more robust.

Coping with Failure

The ability to cope with failure is a vital life skill. It involves acknowledging emotions, analyzing what went wrong, and devising a plan for future attempts. Developing a positive mindset towards failure can transform it from a setback into a stepping stone.

Failure and Success

Success and failure are intrinsically linked. Success is seldom achieved without prior failures. Each failure brings one closer to their goal, provided they are willing to learn and adapt. J.K. Rowling’s journey from rejections to the global success of the Harry Potter series illustrates this beautifully.

Failure in the Educational System

The educational system often penalizes failure, which can stifle learning and creativity. Embracing a more constructive approach to failure, one that encourages experimentation and learning from mistakes, can significantly enhance the educational experience and prepare students for real-world challenges.

Societal Attitudes Towards Failure

Societal attitudes towards failure need to shift from stigma to acceptance. Encouraging open discussions about failure and celebrating the efforts irrespective of the outcome can foster a culture of innovation and resilience.

Personal Stories of Failure and Redemption

Numerous successful individuals have openly shared their experiences with failure, serving as powerful testimonials to its value. These stories inspire and motivate others to embrace their failures, learn from them, and persist towards their goals.

Failure is not the antithesis of success but an integral part of it. By redefining our relationship with failure, recognizing its value, and learning from it, we can unlock our full potential. Failure teaches resilience, fosters innovation, and shapes character, making it an indispensable element in the journey towards success. As students, embracing failure as an opportunity for growth can transform the way we approach challenges, paving the way for a future marked by perseverance, innovation, and success.

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Essay on Failure (1416 Words)

February 20, 2018 by Study Mentor 2 Comments

When a two year old toddler begins to walk for the first time, his parents jump with joy to see their tiny tot’s first big achievement.

The parents disregard the fact that in the process of beginning to walk, the child may have to fall many a times but would gradually start walking on his own.

The focus here is not on the inability of the child to start walking steadily right from the beginning, which they know would never happen, instead they focus on the possibility of the child picking himself up and starting to walk again.

This is a simple instance of success and failure , wherein after repeated attempts of failure by the child to walk all by him, finally tries to do it out of sheer determination and succeeds in it.

The idea here is to explain the term failure in the most relevant manner.   

Failure can be explained in so many ways. Failure can be seen as not being able to achieve success in the tasks performed.

It also means that one’s expectation could not be met in the desired way and hence can be considered a failure.

Failure happens when something breaks down unexpectedly, when a machine is unable to perform its operations in the designated manner or when it provides an outcome in an unexpected fashion.

Failure is perceived in different ways by different people according to their nature.

Some see failure as the end of the road and choose a different road leaving behind the road already travelled.

Some others see failure as a temporary low phase and put in efforts to rise again and see success later on.

Some just lock themselves with their failures, not being able to accept the truth and sit with it for ages to come.   

Table of Contents

Possible reasons that lead to Failure

Failure can occur anywhere and to anyone. In the most common example, we may consider a person trying to start his vehicle routinely to go to his workplace.

When the vehicle started normally every other day, there was absolutely no problem faced.

One day suddenly when the vehicle does not turn on, there is a failure from the part of the vehicle to be unable to get started.

The rider of the vehicle then looks out for alternate means to reach his office and probably when he comes back from his work, he might consider getting his vehicle repaired.

Here, the vehicle showed up failure when it was tried to start, not because it was angry on the rider.

The reasons that led to the failure to start up could be many. May be the rider neglected certain warning signs indicating slowdown of the vehicle.

May be the rider did not bother to maintain the vehicle properly. May be the vehicle faced with a sudden mechanical glitch, that was unexpected by both the vehicle and the rider.

Whatever the reason be, but a failure does not happen all by itself. It is a clear phenomenon and behind every failure lays a list of possibilities that eventually led to it.   

Exploring some generic possibilities about why people see failure in their lives, the list could be as big as the universe itself. Every person has different reasons why he met with a failure in a certain thing he did.

Exploring those reasons and working on them to avoid repeating them in future will avoid meeting with failure for the same thing, another time. Let’s say a student failed in his board exams.

The list of possibilities for his failure could be many. The most obvious reason may be that he did not study up well.

May be the child’s concentration was poor and so he could not focus on what was really required for his exams. May be he had health issues.

May be he forgot to write the relevant answers in the exam leading to his failure. There could be so many possibilities.

What happens right after the student gets to know that he has failed in his exams is the next question in line.

The student obviously feels dejected and if his parents understand their child and are supportive enough, they will first discuss the same with their child in a calm manner.

The student at this stage feels a little comforting feel from his parents but would still be wondering why he was chosen to see the failure he just met with.

If a positive environment is created for the child, very soon he would start looking out for reasons that led to the bad results.

If he is doomed in negativity, he would forget the whole world around him and dip himself in darkness not knowing what to do next.   

Accepting Failure

Why is the word ‘failure’ such a dreaded thing in our minds, such that everybody wishes to taste success without meeting failure on their paths?

Let us again take the instance of a little toddler beginning to walk. Why does it so happen that the child keeps baby steps at first and then slowly learns to walk all by himself, why is that the act of walking is not a one-shot effort, but a continuous self-effort that the child puts in unconsciously and gathers pace?

The explanation is quite simple. When the toddler is learning to keep baby steps, he falls very often. But the toddler never stops himself from getting up and trying all over again.

He keeps repeating this act and finally manages to walk all by himself. This repeated act of getting up and falling down is also accompanied by a measure of self confidence which the child receives by himself at every stage of his fall.

Why can’t we adults apply the same act of getting up whenever we fall down, once we are grown up?   

The child doesn’t see success easily. After multiple repeated efforts he finally manages to walk, but the catch here is, at no point does the child ever stop trying to become successful.

The repeated attempts to finally make it happen is what takes a person out of the failure zone and gets him working towards his success zone.

This can be elaborated thus. Whenever we find ourselves in a bad state of failure, assuming we have failed in exams compared to our friends, it is fine to feel bad about it for some time.

After a while, we should start thinking why we actually couldn’t be successful in our exams.

After finding out the reasons for us, the next best thing to do would be to accept our failure and take self responsibility for it. Accepting failure in itself is a very big step which guides us on what is to be done next.

Sitting with failure, cursing ourselves for not doing things the right way, blaming others for our failures etc does not solve the problem in any way.

Marching ahead and preparing ourselves to think forward is simply the way out. Write down possibilities that may help clear exams in the next attempt. Prepare strategies to work effectively.   

Marching towards Success from Failure

It is very clear that sitting down with failure leads us to nowhere. Learning from past failures and not repeating the same mistakes again lead us towards success.

Failure is not the end of the world. If we have failed in a certain attempt, we should consider it as a learning step and rise up the ladder to make another attempt.

All attempts made may not be fruitful. Success is not guaranteed immediately after an episode of failure.   

When we say a person is successful in his chosen field, it certainly doesn’t mean that the person has never come across failure in his life.

It only means that the person had determination to rise up whenever he had downfalls and finally managed to taste success.

The most successful people in this world are the ones who have met failure the maximum number of times in their attempts.

But out of their grit, they stood up tall and strong, learnt from their mistakes and worked things in the right way. There is always another chance given whenever we go wrong or whenever we saw failure.

Realizing the pain of failure tells us how difficult it is to achieve success in life.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Fear of Failure — The Fear of Failure As My Biggest Failure in Life

Why My Biggest Fear is Failure

• Categories: Failure Fear Fear of Failure

About this sample

Words: 595 |

Published: Sep 1, 2020

Words: 595 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited

• Brown, B. (2010). The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. Hazelden Publishing.
• Duckworth, A. L. (2016). Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Scribner.
• Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of personality and social psychology, 92(6), 1087.
• Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its Discontents. Hogarth Press.
• Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer Publishing Company.
• Pintrich, P. R., & Schunk, D. H. (2002). Motivation in Education: Theory, Research, and Applications (2nd ed.). Prentice Hall.
• Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78.
• Seligman, M. E. (2011). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. Atria Books.
• Sweeny, K., & Duckworth, A. L. (2019). Failure as Fuel: A Self-Regulatory Approach. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 13(11), e12508.
• Tice, D. M., & Bratslavsky, E. (2000). Giving in to feel good: The place of emotion regulation in the context of general self-control. Psychological Inquiry, 11(3), 149-159.

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