I failed my driving test.
Yes, I know it’s a small deal — believe me, I tried to reason with myself on that — but it was still a bitter pill to swallow. The moment I had the results slip in my hand, a million what-ifs started running through my mind: if it was the car, the instructors, the coffee jitters… I really didn’t want to be disinvited from any road trip plans because I couldn’t take the wheel.
It dawned on me that I instinctively responded by berating myself for my incompetencies — “Don’t fail again, you loser” — instead of thinking about whether I was confident enough to bring myself (and the car, of course) across the country in one piece.
Success is often perceived as the singular goal, while failure remains an unfortunate by-product of that process. In hindsight, however, it was my inability to metabolise that failure which drew my attention away from what mattered most — ensuring that I would be safe on the roads — and inhibited me from courageously learning from where I messed up.
It’s easy to assume that we are rational enough to take the setbacks that we face in stride and even use the refrain “bouncing back stronger” as consolation, with this assumption in mind. Yet this often well-intentioned desire to quickly rebound brushes under the carpet the importance of allowing ourselves to process our failures and learn from them.
In short, failure should no longer be slighted as the ugly duckling of our success stories, as it has been in our politics, sports, and schools. To embrace a sustainable, authentic approach to growth and achievement, we need to learn how to accept failure better.
So what?
Failure, if left unaddressed, can have dangerous consequences.
When people do not get what they want, they may have two responses: either stay in denial, or choose to concede. We think we can lay down our egos to do the latter, but the truth is that we often fixate on myopic narratives that obscure the bigger picture.
Take the tumultuous few years that we’ve had at the White House. Even at the highest echelon of American politics, there are leaders who stick to their own delusions and are not able to accept and process their failures. With their influence, they bring multitudes of followers, bolstering the credibility of the conspiracies through strength in numbers. When mobilized, denial can turn into anger, and anger into violence. This has never rang truer than in former President Donald Trump’s own words on that fateful morning of Jan. 6: “We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen.” Emboldened, mobs of Trump supporters violently stormed Capitol Hill. What happened there resulted entirely from one man’s inability to eat humble pie.
More insidiously, when we cannot emotionally reconcile our failures, the more we then condition ourselves to think that they are reflections of our worth. “I’m not good enough” is what we instinctively tell ourselves when we do not hit the anticipated bar, but it takes an intentional effort to separate ourselves and our identities from our actions, a critical process which is too frequently neglected.
Spates of top athletes withdrawing from high-profile events represent how crumbling it can be when this conditioning is taken to the extreme. When we fall and tell ourselves to come back up, we develop a drive that comes from a fear of failure. For these athletes, this stems from a fear of failing to meet expectations, and while such ‘resilience’ can bring an individual to achieve historic feats, there comes a time when all this pressure — paradoxically, more that is liberally heaped on you when you succeed — is all too much.
Japanese tennis pro Naomi Osaka and American gymnast Simone Biles are undisputed world champions in their respective crafts. However, under constant scrutiny, there comes a time when the “weight of the world,” which Biles described in her shocking withdrawal from the women’s team final, can be too much to bear. The actions of these two world-class athletes have created a paradigm shift away from our relentless pursuit for sporting excellence by deliberately separating their self-worth from their defining achievements and choosing to prioritise their own well-being. Yet, in most echelons of our society, this is not the case.
Let’s take Harvard, for example. A straight-A student who fears risking their unblemished record chooses not to take challenging but arguably more intellectually fulfilling courses, erring on the side of caution by taking easier “gem” classes. In so doing, college is a breeze, but one loses out on the rare chance to explore and enrich themselves without restraint. I have to admit; I’m very much guilty of this. Even before coming to college, I found myself slipping into this mindset due to the nature of the college application process. Having been part of the most competitive admissions cycle in recent history was daunting, to say the least. Each part of the process felt like a minefield where one misstep could see you land straight into the rejection pile: There is an overwhelming pressure to present perfection when we are anything but.
The Resistance: Narratives Against Failure
“Suck it up! Stop obsessing over failure. C’mon, bounce back stronger and faster.”
There’s nothing wrong in telling ourselves, or others, to toughen up — we should! But the expectation that we do so stronger and faster changes things completely. When failure is a direct motivator for success, it is unsustainable to expect better and better, in shorter time periods. It also means that the subsequent achieved success is inauthentic, even fraudulent, when pushed by fear rather than a true desire for self-fulfillment.
Both Osaka and Biles have cited losing interest in their sport and the joy of competing in their premature exits. “Put mental health first, because if you don’t, then you’re not going to enjoy your sport and you’re not going to succeed as much as you want to,” Biles stated in a press conference after her withdrawal. It is only in reckoning with failure that one understands that success comes from a genuine desire to excel for excellence’s sake, and when lost, success loses its meaning too. While certain critics have condemned the two athletes as being unable to confront their failures and pick at their poor showings, they largely miss the point: Stepping out of the spotlight has instead given Osaka and Biles the necessary space and time to face their failures head-on.
Perhaps this is the reason why they enjoy enduring success: They are not just sportspeople who win and then fade into obscurity, but dynamic, whole-functioning individuals who realize that sport is not all there is. In a counterintuitive way, this mentality may even have allowed them to elevate their game to new heights.
What next?
Well, we should embrace failure.
When we devote time to process it and separate our actions from our abilities, we allow ourselves to understand failure’s enduring importance. We realize the right motivations that bring us forward; we see the flaws we’ve made and address them boldly. We fight the urge to cover our shortcomings up and move on, because now we recognize failure to be the strong foundation of every worthwhile success.
We take for granted that failure is learnt implicitly when we are unable to succeed. What if instead of success, we learn to expect failure and build ourselves up from the unique opportunities it presents? Such questions — easier as mere conceptions than concrete actions — are always at the back of our minds, yet rarely talked about. It’s why we need to find space in our classrooms, our routines, to normalize open discussions about failure.
I’ve got a driving retest next week. Wish me luck.
Jay Hong Chew, HPR
