Why you shouldn’t be afraid of failure

And what you can learn from it

Imagine: you gave up a lucrative career in a professional field to tell jokes. It’s your first live show. The whole room is waiting for you to come on. Their large eyes are plastered to the stage. The host has announced your name, and the audience is listening, silent and waiting for you to make them laugh. The stage goes dark, except for the single spotlight that follows your small steps as you go towards the centre. You start in a stuttering voice. You deliver the punchline.

Nobody laughs. You wait. Crickets. Someone yawns. Still, nobody laughs.

“Don’t quit your day job!” You hear someone say. Someone laughs. At you. What do you do now?

You have failed.

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There are plenty of stories of failing out there. Much to our embarrassment, many of us have even played the central character in some of them. As students, we are all acquainted with the fear of failure, particularly if you’ve taken MATH 1014.

Even though we are painfully aware of the term, failure is still subjective. Take my own group of friends. For Arslaan, who needs a 8.0 GPA to maintain his scholarship, anything below an A is failure. For another friend, a C+ is fine.

Simply speaking failure is the inability to accomplish a goal you’ve set before yourself, much like the comedian in the story above.

If you have failed, you might walk off the stage and never come back. You’ve taken a risk, and it hasn’t paid off, what now ?

I recently saw saw an article on Quora that caught my eye. “What’s the best mistake you’ve ever done?” (You can read the answer here). To make a long story short, the girl answering the question failed out of college with a 0.9 GPA, came back and graduated with her name on the Dean’s list. Now, we may think that she succeeded despite all the hurdles but in actuality she succeeded in spite of them and sadly enough that’s the part some of us tend to leave out of our stories. She learned that she had made a grave mistake and gave herself a second chance.

It isn’t only that we learn from failure, it’s what we learn from it.

Failure gives you an opportunity for introspection. Maybe that joke wasn’t appropriate for the audience, but it would make someone else laugh. Maybe you actually aren’t good at it, and a few more tries will tell you.

I believe it’s important to fail, because it teaches you something about yourself, your relationships and your life, whether you want the lesson or not. However hard it’s to think of failure positively, it’s a test from which you are meant to learn.

In the beginning of this essay I asked you to imagine a comedian that failed with his first joke, but let’s say he continued to bomb his entire set.

Repetitive failure is common. It’s a direct and often inevitable outcome of trying new things. After-all, Edison invented 1000 ways to make non-functional light-bulbs and one way to make a fully functional one.

Maybe we shouldn’t avoid failure, we should take it head-on. Maybe, we should welcome it with open arms. If anything, it is proof that we tried something, something new and something different. Maybe in retrospect, maybe you should quit your job. Imagine if you hadn’t…would you feel like a success?