Using your defeat as a tool for improvement
By VIOLET ZANZOT— vmzanzot@ucdavis.edu
So, you failed. You let yourself down, got a failing grade in class, got broken up with or felt like the world might end, all because you messed up. I don’t actually know if you have experienced these things, but I can tell you for a fact that I certainly have. It was not pretty, fun or cute, and I definitely felt like I had failed — yet, here I stand.
Failure as an action includes conditions we all seem to have signed on to. For instance, failure is measurable. This means that there is an alternative to failure: there could have been success. It also means that there is a standard, a determining factor that dictates whether some action is a failure or not.
Too often, that determining factor is society, and too often, the thing we use as a measuring stick is other people. The alternative isn’t so great, either: We also use ourselves as the measuring stick. Either way, comparing our actions to other actions is futile. Yet, this comparison, which leads to inevitable failure, is everywhere — and it’s getting worse.
“The phenomenon of personal failure has grown exponentially over recent decades,” author Michael White said in an article by Informit. “Never before has the sense of being a failure to be an adequate person been so freely available to people, and never before has it been so willingly and routinely dispensed.”
Things are getting harder. We compare ourselves more often because we have become hyper-socialized and grown overly accustomed to living in a competitive environment. We reside in an anxious society that often feels divided between winners and losers, or those who succeed and those who fail.
I’m almost certain that I’m not the first to say it, but as a society, we need to take a deep breath and get comfortable with failure. At its worst, it is a means of comparison by which we deem ourselves to be lesser. Comparison is nothing if not “the thief of joy.” I think that, if we need failure to be something, it can serve as an answer to one of our internal questions.
How often in life do we actually get any real answers, especially to those philosophical questions we ask ourselves? Is our idea of failure just a way for us to reconcile with a truth we might be afraid of? However, if we settle on the idea that we are simply not good enough at something, that is a definitive answer.
So, congratulations, you have failed at something. What that means is that you have an answer to a question. Are you good enough to be in the National Basketball Association (NBA)? Maybe not. Should you be afraid to try out for your community basketball team? Also, maybe not. Because in order to get the answer to the question, we have to try.
I think when I set out to write about failure, I intended to bash on comparison. To damn the word “should” to oblivion because it has just become another metric people use to compare things. Now that I’m nearing the end, I realize that I failed in condemning comparison.
Failure is a way to get an answer, and trying is a way to ask a question. I certainly don’t think there are many better things than being inquisitive, except maybe just being kind. My point is, while on a personal scale it might feel like you’re failing, or maybe in the socio-political atmosphere it feels as though we are collectively failing, maybe that’s just an answer to a question. Your next question should be: How can we try harder? Or, better yet — what can we do differently?
Written by: Violet Zanzot— vmzanzot@ucdavis.edu
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