Celebrating Failure

I think my biggest failure this semester was in my finance class. I knew from the beginning that the class is basically set up to fail you (40% midterm, 60% final, EC only counts if your end grade is below a 70% at the end of the course, normal grading curve), and on top of that this is the first time this teacher is teaching the course at UF so all the old exams given as practice tests are only helpful to a certain point because of differences between this professor and the previous one. It was very difficult to keep up with, and I often found myself several times throughout the semester behind on lectures and trying to keep up. Now I’m in a position where if I don’t get a 75% on the next exam I will likely have to retake the class (the average on the first exam was a 51%, so a 75% is a lot harder than it sounds). I think what made it even more frustrating was the fact that it’s a subject that I likely won’t be using very often professionally.

What I learned from this failure was that often times people and things will be going against you because they don’t want you to succeed. Life works the same way as my finance class. Just like this class is set up in a way to fail people that don’t put in enough effort or who just aren’t very good at the subject, employers and businesses only want the best. So they’re going to push you and test you and compare you with others to make sure that you can meet their need for the very best. Starting a business or a venture concept is the same thing. People will try to end your idea or put you out of business because it’s a dog eat dog world.

I think failure is a part of life. We’ve all failed at something, nobody’s perfect. I think I personally handle all of my failures differently because they are different scenarios and should be treated as such. I may get emotional with some that I worked really hard for or get really frustrated when I was really close but didn’t quite make it. I think these are natural reactions that anyone could have to any situation but I think it’s how you handle failure that separates the people who eventually succeed from the people who eventually give up. You have to look at your failures and analyze what went wrong and why and figure out how to change it. You have to look at all the possibilities and decide which course of action should you take next. I think this class has showed me that great things can come directly from failure and I definitely think that I would be more likely to take a risk than I was four months ago.