to embrace failure

After going through some failures of my own recently, I’m reminded that success is all too often, taken for granted. When things don’t go as planned, we are quick to blame people and things, but when good things happen, we don’t take the time to appreciate all the important pieces needed in order to create success. Failures not only serve as great teaching tools, but also help us to appreciate the moments of triumph that much more. It’s funny that our eyes and ears are so keen on picking up success stories that are either completely bogus (think informercial or junk mail) or only tell one side of the story. In reality, most real success stories are often the result of a lesson learned from a previous failure.

Over a year ago, during an unplanned system outage, someone made the comment “You know, it’s good to have these types of problems every now and then to keep things fresh, or otherwise, we wouldn’t know what to do when we actually encountered problems.” In other words, “Lighten up, because without problems, we’d all be out of a job.” We ought to be embrace failure more, because behind every failure is an opportunity.

I’m currently applying to grad school and one of the more popular essay questions is “What is your biggest accomplishment?”. What this question, I believe, is really asking is what lessons have you learned from your past failures and how have you applied that to improve something?

In short, it’s not the result that matters but what you’ve learned along the way.