A few days ago, I got a sixty-seven percent on an essay. Sixty-seven. To put it in the nicest way possible, this absolutely devastated me. A sixty-seven? I never got anything below a ninety on all my other essays. I even aced an essay where the next highest score in the class was seventy-five. And to add insult to injury, all my friends scored at least twenty-five percent higher than me. How was this possible? How could I fail when I had never failed before?
See no Failure, Hear no Failure, Speak no Failure
I spent the next few hours in delusion, coming up with all sorts of excuses about why I didn’t actually do so bad. Maybe my teacher inserted the wrong grade. Maybe he forgot to add the marks up right. Whatever happened, there was no way I could have failed. I didn’t need to change anything, and my teacher was in the wrong, not me.
Deluding yourself as I did is possibly the worst mindset you can have when approaching failure. If you sweep your failure under the rug and blame your own shortcomings on other people, you will never understand how to improve. The first step to moving forward and coming back stronger after failing is to accept the fact that you failed. As counterintuitive as it seems, admitting your failure is the first step to success.
“I Did the Best I Could Do”
When you fail at something, there is clearly room for improvement when you do something similar next time. At first, I told myself that my failure was completely out of my hands, and I did all that I could do. However, there was definitely something different about this essay that fell short of my better essays. I needed to analyze why I failed, so I could prevent a similar failure in the future.
When you fall short of your expectations, always ask yourself, “Why?” That way, you can retrace your steps and figure out exactly what you did wrong. Once you pinpoint your mistakes, you will remember to avoid repeating these mistakes. A good way to figure out the reason for your failure is to describe what you did leading up to the failure, step by step. Don’t make up false details or omit things you don’t like, try to tell it as it happened. Tell yourself what you did, not what you should have done.
I retold myself what happened:
Before handing in this disastrous essay, I handed in a practice essay. However, my teacher lost the essay and never handed it back to me. I immediately saw my mistake: Because I never got feedback on the practice essay, I had no idea what the teacher’s expectations were for the actual essay. And to make it even worse, I never went to the teacher for help when I was writing the actual essay, so the whole writing process was like a blind walk through a dark forest, where I was confused and lost.
Remember Your Mistakes
After I found my mistakes, I needed to remember them for a similar situation next time. I wrote in my agenda that I forgot to ask for feedback on my essay, so I could remind myself to watch out for this next time. I highly recommend giving yourself a tangible reminder of how to fix what you did wrong, to avoid forgetting the advice you give yourself.
Make a Plan for the Future
Finally, it was time to figure out how to do better next time. I went back to my description of what happened, and asked myself, “What could I do differently?” These changes connected directly to the mistakes I identifi
ed. I didn’t get any feedback on my practice essay, so I could have looked at my friend’s practice essay feedback. I didn’t ask for feedback from my teacher, so I needed to go up to him and ask for help more often.
When you plan to bounce back from your failure, you should think of a way to fix the mistakes you made. Tell yourself: “I made the mistake of ______, so I will fix this mistake by doing ______ next time.”
Success is not Final, Failure is not Fatal
Every one of us has the potential to change. Sometimes, we make mistakes and change for the worse. But we also have the potential to change for the better after we fail. All we need to do is to understand our mistakes and push ourselves to fix them in the future.