Failure
Honestly though, what is success when achieved through fear of being labeled as a failure by society? Not what you would want it to be, right? It would be what the person who made you scared of failure would want. That’s probably why people try so hard to push their children in this or that direction without even stopping to see what the kid wants. It is a shame! Seeking your parents approval, when in all reality they didn’t even receive their parents approval. They were such a failure that they have to implement, their parents hopes for them, on you. Forgetting to care about what you actually want out of life, and resulting in your midlife crisis that develops into a depression. Followed shortly by the loss of everything you’ve achieved for a reason your not even sure was worth it. Now your parents are calling you a failure just like their parents did them. Funny how such a messed up cycle can stem from one lousy little word, failure. There should be a class in school devoted to the understanding of failure. Accepting it allows for you to self reflect, which gives you the opportunity to understand where you went wrong in the first place. Without failure nothing we have today would exist. Yet, we still label the little kid who didn’t fully understand geometry because he was dyslexic as a failure. He is then put in a box for the rest of his life, all because something that wasn’t his fault. Tommy, “Haaaa remember when jimmy failed geometry class” Billy, “Oh yeah, didn’t they hold him back?”, endlessly picked on for one reason. If only we could replace the negative stigma used to label someone as a failure. Change the entire meaning of failure that is upheld by our societal standards. Teach kids that failure isn’t some big bad monster you never want to encounter, but really the foundation on which you build the sturdiest form of understanding. Not to be ashamed of failure, but to accept it as an opportunity to simply reevaluate what you thought you knew. A spotlight used to show areas that you need to pay twice as much attention to next time. Self reflection is a key part in figuring out who you are as a person, but rendered unnecessary at a young age due to the fear of failure. We push for excellence from the very beginning, thus removing failure as an option. I would like to take a class and teach it the importance of failure, and how to use failure to better understand everything they had trouble with. Then compare grades and course completion percentage to a class where the teacher resents the idea of failure. After all that, I’d ask both classes how confident they were in the material they learned. This would make for an interesting social experiment. I theorize that the grades and completion percentages would be slightly higher for my class, but confidence in subject mastery would be notably higher. Just imagine: Tommy said, “You remember jimmy, the one that failed second grade?” Billy says, “Oh yeah, just the other day I heard that he went on to become a failure!” Tommy, “A failure, no way. Wow, that’s really good for him. I spent my whole life achieving goals solely through success. So when I finally failed….man I lost everything because I didn’t know how to reflect based upon wrong decisions. I was such a success that when I failed I was clueless to where I had gone wrong. I was blindsided by ignorance, so oblivious to the tiniest lack of understanding. Which I didn’t need to be aware of as long as I understood 89% of the material. The other 11% didn’t matter when I understood 89%, so why ever waste the time to learn it”. This is how I would like to reinvent the word failure. Have society praise the failure, for he will be the one with a better overall understanding of the material.