The Consequences of Failure
When I was about eleven years old, I was a figure skater.
I was attracted to the glamour and the beauty of the sport; the grace, the power, and the fluidity all tantalized me. However, at times, the romanticism was gilded, and I had an inherent fear of falling. The ice was hard and unforgiving, and up to that point, the most dangerous thing I had done was only look one way before crossing the street. And I still have nightmares about it.
Eventually, the time came for me to part ways with the sport that had pulled me in due to its potential for greatness, and I chalked it up to boredom. I wasn’t getting anywhere with it, so I just let it go. Soon after, I conceded that boredom was mostly frustration with my progress, but I convinced myself frustration and boredom were interchangeable, and I shrugged it off, moving on to the next phase of my life. It took me years to realize the true reason that I quit.
I wasn’t willing to fall, so I was limited; I couldn’t learn anything, because every time I tried to do something, I held back out of apprehension.
It took me longer than a few years to realize that was a metaphor for my life. It still pains me to admit that; I have a fear of falling. Nowadays, some might say the opposite: I’m taking all advanced classes, I’m in multiple AP courses, I’m participating in clubs, and none of this is easy. However, I think that a part of it still stems from a fear of failure. All failure itself is inherently the same. The definition is accurate: “lack of success.” Short, biting, to the point. However, it’s the consequences of failure that differ.
Sometimes, the consequences aren’t as big a deal. We bombed a small task, and the outcome certainly left something to be desired, but it didn’t really mean anything to us. However, failure involving the bigger moments in life is a different story. We’re all human, so we all have values and aspirations. When we can’t have what we value most, when we can’t become it, we’re left with certain repercussions that can stun us and make us too afraid and depressed to ever try again.
It’s not so much the fall that we hate, but hitting the ground. The act of failure lasts a second; the aftermath can last a lifetime. In order to deal with lack of success in one area, or to overcome our apprehension, we first need to understand what, exactly, these consequences are that we’re so afraid of. Here are the most common ones.
1. Physical pain
The greatest evil is physical pain. -St. Augustine
Physical pain, at least to me, is one of the more superficial types of consequence, but nonetheless, it provokes an animalistic instinct within us that cannot be ignored. Our first reaction is to avoid any unnecessary pain; we don’t want to feel it, and we shy away from it in some of the most creative ways possible. When pain results from failure, however, it is usually accompanied by more emotional consequences as well. The physical discomfort is a mere precursor to the deeper wounds, which makes it hurt all the more.
The most obvious example of pain is some sort of physical activity that incurs high risk. Falling while ice skating, on the outer levels, is about the consequence of physical pain. With some sports, we subject ourselves to sprained ankles, concussions, broken bones, and an innumerable amount of scrapes and bruises. However, the physical pain wouldn’t be as bad if it wasn’t linked with the other types of consequences.
Take a career-ending sports injury, for example. The athlete, in the moment of blinding pain, isn’t concerned so much about the physicality of the situation. The true pain is the end of an era, the end of a time of glory and success.
In a way, pain is the greatest evil. It’s the unmistakable sign that the worst is yet to come, and that we’ll be dealing with greater repercussions soon enough.
2. Loss
It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone. -John Steinbeck
Loss is one of the most emotionally heart-wrenching consequences of failure, and it usually is one of the most feared aspects of failure in existence. When we set out to accomplish something, it’s one thing to not accomplish that task. That’s pure failure within itself with different consequences, but it is contained. However, when we are not only unsuccessful, but lose what we already have, that is a twisted and crippling kind of blow that can be hard to bounce back from.
It happens to plenty of students. The advanced students with the top college aspirations and the highest standards for themselves take the most challenging classes available to them. Their one goal is to ace all of them, and for a long time, they maintain that 4.0, and it’s within their grasp. However, a hard test comes, the student doesn’t understand a concept, and suddenly that 4.0 is gone. One misstep, one mistake, and what we have can slip right through our fingers, leaving us worse than we were before we decided to try.
Steinbeck was right: When we know what it felt like to achieve near perfection, to stand in the sun, and then we’re suddenly pushed aside, we can’t help but know better. We know what’s out there because we were there at one point, and it hurts more than anything to feel like we’ll never have that again. It’s hard to see in such endless darkness when we’ve grown so accustomed to light.
3. Rejection
The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted. -Mother Teresa
We’ve all been rejected at one point or another. The stereotypical examples, the first ones that come to mind, are getting shot down by a crush or getting cut from the school play. These examples are relatively easy to overcome; there’s no long-term struggle in getting up and moving on. However, certain types of rejection that deal with our values and highest aspirations are much more toxic, much harder to shake off. We can feel like we’re inadequate, like we’re unworthy of being a part of something worthwhile.
We can work towards something our entire lives, only to have success turn us down flat. The most prevalent example among students at the high school age is college admissions. Many students I know are highly motivated and intelligent, and they dream of the prestigious Ivy League, with acceptance rates as low as 5 or 6 percent. Some of them have dealt with rejection already, and it’s hard for them to accept rejection from what they’ve been working towards for years. Some of them are okay after a while, some of them spiral down into regret for wasted years and a into a lack of self-confidence.
We can be infected with any kind of bodily disease, but feelings of inadequacy will kill us inside faster than any illness. We have an inherent need to be good enough to someone, good enough for something, and when we fall short, we can’t help but feel defective and worthless.
4. Waste of time
Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been.” -Kurt Vonnegut
None of us want to feel like our lives have been a waste of time. That’s possibly the worst regret to have, to feel like nothing we’ve done has had any significance in the world. The true marker of this type of consequence is proximity. We were so close, so close to that hard-fought success, and we got our hopes up. However, everything came crashing down, and we failed. We couldn’t do what we’ve spent time, maybe even years, on. So then, really, what was the point? Was all of that time wasted? I mean, it was all devoted to that one goal, and we couldn’t achieve it. Was there any point in even trying?
Sometimes, this feeling of wastefulness goes hand-in-hand with rejection. Let’s go back to the driven advanced students. They applied to college, they got the rejection letter, and while feeling the pain of rejection, they also now begin to wonder what the point of all those years of work was. Maybe they still got accepted into an excellent school, but not the one that they wanted. Maybe they had the GPA and the extracurriculars and the community service, but college admissions are fickle and, unfortunately, much of it is up to chance. That highly coveted school, the one that required all of the hours studying, turned them down flat, and all of the times they told their friends they couldn’t go out because they had too much work, all of the missed opportunities, they don’t matter anymore.
If it “might have been,” if we were close, then that means we put a considerable amount of time and effort into our actions, making the result of failure cause us to question our lives up until that point.
5. Failing before you begin
The best way to guarantee a loss is to quit. -Morgan Freeman
This is an extremely ironic consequence, one that might not even be considered a consequence depending on how we look at it. Sometimes, our apprehension about failure is so severe that it sets in before any sign of trouble even begins. We could be doing fine; we could be succeeding, but we’re waiting for the inevitable storm following the calm. Things have to go south; entropy consumes all us until we descend into chaos, so we decide to cut our losses, or lack thereof, and run.
This type of consequence is decidedly the saddest. Of course we failed; we never even finished it out. We never gave ourselves the chance to fall down in the first place. I think that’s the primary element of my failure in figure skating. I quit before I could ever fall too hard. By doing so, I also quit before I could succeed to any great extent.
Wins and losses are attached to one another. How can we possibly expect to win if we refuse to accept the possibility for loss? The simple answer: We can’t.
If you’re going to try, go all the way…It’s the only good fight there is. -Charles Bukowski
These consequences can be so severe and heartbreaking that it’s not hard to understand why many of us will decide to never try again, to live a life of passivity and security.
But, here’s the thing many of us never think about: if we tried once, we got the worst of it out of the way. The consequences of failing severely for the first time will always be the most painful and hard to deal with, and we must accept that. If we get up and brush off the dust, we can learn from our errors and learn how to continue through the pain. Maybe we’ll fail again, but we’ll be a little better at bouncing back than we were before.
We tried once, and to stop after that first failure would be like stopping right in the middle. If we were going to try in the first place, why not keep going? We have to move forward, or else our paralyzing fear will render everything we had worked for up until that point moot.
Anything worth having is going to threaten us. The alternative is to live a life of insignificance and dissatisfaction. Even though failure is painful, at least it’s better than the hollow feeling of letting the years go by without ever trying.
Maybe I shouldn’t have quit figure skating. It’s a thought that haunts me often, because it’s a prime example of letting consequences keep me from living the way I want to. When I did fall, it was never that bad, but the looming threat of its possibility made me run away before I could ever even come close to accomplishing what I wanted.
What I’ve come to find is that regret is, actually, a kind of failure in itself, and it’s the one with the worst possible consequences. Regret is a fall we can’t pick ourselves up from, because at that point, it’s too late.
Embrace the possibility of failure in chasing something you love, learn to fall as soon as you can, and you’ll be picking yourself up and persevering sooner than you think. Always remember that you control the consequences, not the other way around. It’s never the end until you decide it is. So decide to try again.
