Empowerly

Student profile

The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?  593/650

Despite waking up at 4 a.m., my friend and I were very awake by the time we reached [college name] five hours later for the [name] budget prosthetic arm challenge. When it was our turn to demonstrate the prosthetic arm, we walked up to the table for our first challenge: Pick up objects from one bucket, place them on the other bucket, then place those objects back in the original bucket. We had practiced this many times at home, so we were more than ready. We began immediately, focused on victory. The arm was performing well, but midway, the Arduino processor--the most important component--began to glitch. The arm’s fingers began to move without our commands. Suddenly, one of the cables attached to the fingers stretched to its breaking point, rendering our prosthetic arm useless. We not only scored zero points for that challenge, but for the remaining challenges as well. Our energetic mood and happiness turned into frustration and confusion.

During the four-hour bus drive back home, our [name] supervisor told me that she noticed our struggles in the competition. She wanted to know more, but I couldn’t tell her much, since I was still quite shocked by the arm’s unexpected malfunction. She seemed to notice my stupefied look, so she patted me on the back and said, “It’s unfortunate that you lost the competition, but are you ready to accept it?”

I pondered her question and suddenly understood that she was concerned about my attitude towards failure. During the bus ride, I realized that I was frustrated because I didn’t know what to do about it. It soon hit me to change my frustration to open-mindedness so I could learn from this experience and do better. It was honestly quite as simple as that, and it made me chuckle. When I got off the bus, I had learned that life will be unpredictable and I will fail if I let defeat overwhelm me. To prevent getting overwhelmed by failure, I learned to be open to the possibility of failure. 

I had the chance to apply this perspective during my summer internship at a tech startup, where I was hired to add some functionality to the company’s website. My boss told me to employ agile programming, which is a way of speeding up the process of getting a product out. Initially, I struggled with this style of programming, and one time I actually failed to produce anything for a meeting. Although I was initially very embarrassed, I quickly pulled myself together to determine what I needed to do. It became clear to me that my mindset of producing the “perfect” product was slowing me down. It soon occurred to me to focus on making a functional prototype, even if it had some bugs. With this new understanding, I improved the product substantially after each meeting. In the end, my boss was pleased with my results, despite the rough beginning.

One of my favorite philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, once said, “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” It sounds negative, but this perspective is one of my keys to happiness in life. I know I feel the happiest when learning something, rather than beating myself up over a failure. I discovered that these failures can teach me new perspectives and even pave the way for deeper understanding, solutions and new opportunities. As a result, I developed the ability to reorient myself when circumstances change, the strength to meet challenges head on and the courage to fail.