April 15th-
Reading-Chapter 6
You learn more from failures than successes.
Explain the difference between a successful failure and a failed success. Do you learn
more from successfully failing or failing successfully? Please explain.
Throughout the year, our program has met highly successful people ranging from American University deans to the former United States Secretary of State, Colin Powell. Although some of us may have entered the program believing that the greatest lessons we would learn would come from our successes, I think it’s safe to say that we have all learned that our greatest lessons come more from our failures. Throughout the failures, we have learned what actions to avoid or what barriers we must circumvent, which have ultimately led to us outnumbering our failures with our successes.
Chapter 6 of Give Smart, addresses a question we should constantly ask ourselves: Am I getting better? Without knowing the answer to this, we cannot learn to adapt our methods in order to yield the best results. Tierney and Fleishman however, acknowledge that getting better does not only include the short-term gains. In fact, the most important part about getting better is to foresee the impact the short-term gains have on your long-term gains.
Give Smart also discusses how self-improvement isn’t such a black and white task. Instead, it’s a continuous effort that we must all take in different ways. Moreover, because improving isn’t black and white, we must enter it acknowledging that there are risks we must take and that the risks we take don’t have guaranteed successes.
Not all of the opportunities for learning we come by prepare us for improvement. For example, learning that improves our ability to make wiser decisions about our strategy and the execution of our strategy, prepares us more for accomplishment. On the other hand, if we try to learn only by the results we anticipate, we may find ourselves getting off track and confused.
Another way to learn is by understanding the failures of the people who surround you. People, who have experienced things before you, are able to advise you on what actions to take or avoid in order to evade their same failures. This is why mentoring is so crucial to learning, because it provides outside insight for possible successes and failures that you may not have thought about.
A successful failure is a failure that has taught you some sort of life-long lesson. So for instance, last summer I did not have as many summer plans as I hoped, because I failed to apply early. It was a successful failure, because I learned more about what exactly I wanted to do during my summers and how my only flaw was my lack of time-management. This summer, I now have various summer plans to choose from because I took into account what I learned last year, and applied much earlier this time.
A failed success is perhaps best described as a ‘success’ that according to the individual hasn’t reached its full potential. I think we shouldn’t be afraid of making failed successes, because oftentimes our failed successes bring a better change for others. So if extending my vision to reach a larger population falls short in only successfully reaching a smaller group, I wouldn’t be entirely upset about the failure, because I was still able to improve the lives of some people. This of course is a type of success I believe many doctors come must accept. Although many aspiring doctors want to rid the world of disease or help everyone, the reality of it is that an individual person cannot help everyone in the world.
Although in the past I have learned from both failing successfully and successfully failing, I believe I learn more from failing successfully. I learn more from this type of failure, because it helps me to learn to accept my failures as the past and occasional reference them help me avoid the same failures and thus gain more successes.
-Tamaara Bostwick
