Celebrating Failure

In my Equity and Capital Markets class this semester, my teacher told us the first week that we will have pop quizzes during class once in awhile and the highest 4 of those will each count for 5% of our grade. 5% sounded like nothing, so I did close to nothing to prepare for these quizzes. On the first one, I got a 3/10. I thought we would have many more since only the highest 4 would count and I would have plenty of time to redeem myself. About a month later, the second quiz rolled around and again, I got a 3/10. This time, I calculated my grade and figured out that these quizzes would count for 20% of my final grade, so I started to worry. The class was about half over and we had only had 2 quizzes, so I worried that my teacher's statement about the "highest 4" counting was misleading, and we would only have 4 quizzes total! She addressed us soon after that and told us that we would have 6 quizzes, so I began to prepare before each class and I made sure I knew the information in case we had a quiz. I learned that I shouldn't have written off these quizzes from the start as if they were nothing. I now prepare every week in the event that we should have a quiz. I got an 8/10 on the third one and a 10/10 on the fourth one, and I'm still waiting to take the 5th and 6th quizzes!

I think failure obviously is embarrassing and an initially negative thing. It doesn't feel good and it can feel like a very detrimental thing at first. But, it is overall always a learning experience. It actually might be even more beneficial than success sometimes because we don't learn nearly as much from success as we do from failure. Obviously there are different levels of failure: failing at cooking something feels much different than failing a test or even a class. But both of these failures result in a learning experience and changing your behavior and actions for the next time you try.

In this class, we have had to share our thoughts and ideas with people and accepted criticism about them. We have also had to put ourselves out there with posts like elevator pitches and sharing details in personal posts which I haven't had to do in any other class. I think this has changed my perspective on failure because of the feedback I got: we might've been afraid of failure or bad feedback but then you realize that everyone is doing the same thing that you are in this class and they are all offering constructive and helpful criticism. I think I am less afraid of failure now than I was in the beginning of this class.