The Success in Failure

By Corinne Feight

Students are placed on an impossible pedestal, especially in college. In twenty-two years, are we really supposed to have it all figured out? That seems to be the expectation. Pick a major equates to pick a life. Are we really mentally prepared for the gravity of that decision?

I’m certainly not, but then again, I think failure is a crucial part of the human equation. We have to fail. We have to make poor decisions. We have to choose political science over photography, only to later realize (usually in our senior year) that this really is not where our passions lie. So what do we do? We run that victory lap, knowing that in the end our happiness will (eventually) trump that extra couple thousand in student loans. Still, maybe we don’t figure it out right now. Maybe it takes that first week on the job or the months spent on the road.

I heard a professor give a speech last year. It was funny. It was sad. It was real. He took the crowd through his life. He told us about his house growing up where his dad built their front door because their family was too poor to afford one from the store. He showed us that he was a childhood deviant. He broke the rules. He didn’t apply himself in school. Yet the funny thing was that he was before us, a professor at a prestigious university, laughing as if he only could have known. His recent past is littered with awards and honors—his greatness extending far beyond his reach.

Yet throughout his memoir, he only wanted to leave us with three points. A send-off, if you will, combined with a strong hope. He wanted us to believe in ourselves. He wanted us to live everyday to the fullest, and he wanted us to be persistent, realizing that persistence must sometimes follow the most tragic of failures. Even with his checkered past, he told us that he’d made it. He was standing on that stage—recently voted the most popular professor across the entire campus.

As I stand here, staring ahead at the daunting task of project managing the spring career fair, I know wholeheartedly that I will make mistakes. I will encounter setbacks. I will fail, completely and utterly, to translate the seamlessness in my head to the reality of those four days. Still, success is buried in each floundered attempt. We’re supposed to fail sometimes. For without failure, how bland and lackluster would our college experience be? I think we need to go big or go home. So I intend to go down in flames, so that the end result will not only be more magnificent, but even better than the budding picture in my mind.

The past and the present are ever evolving, malleable and shifting. It’s strange to think that the direction I am headed now may not be anywhere close to where I’ll be years down the road. For Michael Morrison, it definitely wasn’t. But then again, isn’t the uncertainty half of the fun? Isn’t each failure really a blessing, mysteriously disguised as a fault?