Look, the biggest failure that I've ever committed in my life is something too personal to go into so I've decided to look upon failure in the less human sense and more mental path. In other words, I'd rather not look at personal crises and moments of absolute weakness and degradation and instead towards moments where a simple case of thinking would've solved something quite quickly and made everyone's life easier. Ironically enough, my big failure involves one of my first successes in being able to travel to Ireland with the Innovation Academy. I had been accepted on the trip but also failed to contact a representative before leaving on my flight, failed to check and use my new computer, and failed to convert any currency to carry on my person. As a result I was lost in a foreign airport without a hope in Hell (in my mind, at least). I ended up having to pull $100 in Euros to pay for a taxi to drive me to the college where we were meeting before almost losing my luggage on a wayward bus. Once I had landed and gotten settled, I found my computer had contracted some malware and was without it for a week of studies. Another few hundred dollars and that was fixed, but all in all by the end of my travels I had barely $40 to my name after it all. In general, I learned that having a contingency plan for every action you commit is ultimately one of the best ways to live your life in terms of monetary gain and a stress-free existence.
All that said, I like failure as a concept. It is a necessary part of society, and I feel efforts made towards moving people away from the possibility of failure ultimately do more harm than good. To eat only sweets and never know a bitter flavor in your life? That's not living. Me, I try not to get existential about it. It is what it is, and you sweep it up and put it with the other failures in your life. After this class, though, I am more willing to see where failures will take me in terms of a narrative.
I really like the sentence "I like failure as a concept" that you mentioned on the last paragraph. I also like your attitude towards failure. For example, from the first paragraph, you mentioned many awful things, but you converted these things into an useful experience. Hope you can convert every failures into experience and knowledge!
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your story of a time you experienced failure. I travel by airplane a lot to visit family and have similar experiences with not prechecking travel plans and things I need for traveling to different destinations. There were a few times I was not prepared for the flight with certain documents that they wouldn’t even allow me on the flight. I had to pay extra fees and travel the next day. Terrible experiences traveling and failure, but I learned from those experiences and would like to think I grew more into an experienced travel and learned not to makes those minor mistakes.
ReplyDeleteThat is a pretty crazy story of failure! As I was reading I kept thinking to myself, "How the hell did that happen?!" but let's be serious it sounds like something I probably would have done in the past. I also definitely agree that contingency plans are key, one cannot base their future on one path alone.
ReplyDeleteInteresting analysis on failure. I'm surprised that you were given so much leeway with your trip (to the point of not having a set route to the college). I wonder how much of what happened was really "failure" on your part and what was just poor planning. Arguably, they are the same, but it's not like you didn't make it to Ireland. I'm glad the trip still happened, foreign experiences are quiet formative.
ReplyDelete*quite
ReplyDelete