Failure is super underrated
I was chatting with a couple friends today (both non-engineers) and we were talking about late submissions and extensions for assignments. One of my friends said how she has never once submitted something late in her life. The other chimed in and agreed, saying she hadn’t either and they had both never asked for an extension. My first thought was, wow that is really impressive, I’ve definitely had the odd late submission or extension request — perhaps I’m just less competent.
But then I thought about a conversation which has come up a number of times with a few mentors recently; that doing well in school isn’t actually an indicator of how well you’ll do in the real world. As in, there is very little (or even an inverse) correlation between outstanding grades and competence in just about everything outside of school.
Disclaimer: this is obviously not the case for everyone, and some people manage to kill it in school and everything else. This is just a general rule based on the average individual (like me!).
You do well in school, you get straight A’s, hand everything in on time, do everything you were ‘supposed’ to do. And what does that get you by the end of your degree?
A familiarity with the familiar. A tendency to always put on your plate exactly what you can handle. A tendency to seek comfort, to pursue things where you can maintain your perfect record and keep up this aspect of your identity where you have never done anything off of your perfect path. I don’t think this is a worse or wrong path, and is often necessary for certain aspirations, but I do think that the weight we place on certain metrics (like good grades) which are not necessarily correlated with long-term success need to be re-examined.
Interestingly, I feel like my identity has been sculpted into the absolute opposite of a studious Type-A overachiever in the past few years (this is probably pretty surprising to anyone who knew me in high school only). I love a good deadline cram, I love the discomfort, the challenge, the change of something I’ve never done before or even a course which feels just a level too hard. It all feeds me in some weird way I can’t quite explain. But I’m proud of that part of me which loves that spark of chaos and uncertainty. I’m proud of the fact that I can spend 2 days in full fledged grind mode to go into an exam as prepared as possible instead of letting myself get caught up in a vicious and unproductive thought loop about how unprepared I feel (what I probably came into my engineering degree doing). I’m proud of the lowest marks I’ve gotten, because they were in courses which I quite honestly was not qualified to be taking and thought were impossible at the time, but managed to get through relatively unscathed, obtaining knowledge I would never have had I not pushed myself.
Resourcefulness ∝ 1/(academic excellence)
Resourcefulness is inversely proportional to academic excellence.
What a concept, eh? You would think that the two would be directly correlated; if you did well in school, you’d crush it at everything you do afterwards because you’re hard-working and bright, right? Well, not necessarily, actually.
I feel relatively equipped to be talking about this topic, particularly because I have spent time at both ends of this spectrum.
I’ve been the laser-focused A+ student putting school above everything, getting into university on a full scholarship and staking the vast majority of my identity on how ‘smart’ I was (with my definition of smart being largely tied up in what my grades looked like).
And I’ve also been the multi tasking, overwhelmingly busy, way-too-much-on-my-plate-but-kinda-loving-it student with the occasional (or not so occasional) questionable grade or missed deadline. With all the experiences I had to juggle and manage though, my ability to take on large, complex problems on a timeline improved drastically, and helped me become an overall more developed human.
There are obvious pros and cons to both of these approaches to a university experience.
Excelling vs. Growing
Killing it in school and feeling like you always have your sh*t together is possibly one of the most confidence-boosting and comforting places to be in. Good for the mind and the self esteem. But stepping into something that feels like it’s pushing your limits — where you don’t know if it’ll work out — is a whole new level of exciting and nourishing, and in the long-term, I would argue, is much more beneficial.
This isn’t immediately obvious, nor is it a mindset which is easy to adopt if you’re still colour coding your notes with a set of 24 perfectly organised coloured pens and refusing to go into an exam unless you have done every practice problem three times (read: me in high school).
Learning how to handle failure
One of the hardest things for me in university was getting used to failing. I had no idea how to handle the concept of not getting grades which lined up exactly with how I saw myself academically.
So, you can imagine my Type A, over achieving, diligent self used to seeing only the high 90s I got in high school sitting down pretty dumb-founded after seeing a 38% staring back at me on my first multivariable calculus midterm in second year. Yes no typo, 38%! (Actually, it was a 37.5, but we’re rounding up for cleanliness).
This is possibility the BIGGEST blow you can get to your self esteem when you identify mostly with your performance in school.
I remember thinking: I failed? I only got 38% of this exam right? How is that possible?
It’s baffling. Heart breaking. Terrifying. Anxiety inducing. Its the worst feeling!
And then…. It subsides. And you realize that you’re actually the same human being you were before you opened that mark up, and this is all just a minor blip in your life which you just need to pick yourself up from and move on. And once you get there mentally, you can actually figure out what went wrong — if you overestimated how much you knew, if you panicked or blanked, or if you simply just didn’t prepare well enough. It also helps to remember that in a program like engineering where many people drop out or won’t even try starting it, the occasional bad mark actually isn’t the worst thing in the world, and definitely isn’t representative of your overall capabilities. As you continue to feed the thoughts which highlight the good parts of failure and untangle your own self image with how well you are doing in school, you will become more open to trying new things and pushing yourself in ways which will make you a much more interesting, capable, employable and frankly, happy individual than if you were just getting straight A+’s.
Leaning into uncertainty
After getting this mark and a few other that year, I decided I was going to have to make myself interesting and unique in more ways than just being an excellent student. With this surge of self realisation, I dove into managing a business while taking 7 engineering and math courses, I spent my time participating in events, clubs, and conferences that interested me, I did things I was proud of, and I began to formulate a self identity which wasn’t purely propped up by my academic performance.
And I can confidently say I’m much better off for that.
Learning to separate your self worth from the feedback you’re getting from your grades isn’t easy. I remember being absolutely crushed every time I didn’t do as well as I thought I would or felt intensely worried when I was going into an exam unprepared. But as I got better at judging how much work I needed to do, how prepared I was, how my performance went — each pending mark started to become less scary and daunting in my mind, and I was able to view my own abilities and self worth independently from my academics.
Learning how to deal with failure may not seem directly applicable to you right now, but then you might want to ask: why aren’t I failing?
As I write this in the fourth year of my Applied Mathematics and Engineering degree, learning from and embracing failure in a positive way has become a huge part of my life. My degree has honestly been jam packed with failure. But each failure has come with a lesson, usually an important one, which has made me better suited and more knowledgeable for the next thing I did.
And after four years of failure, I actually feel pretty damn good about myself!
Now, not only does failure not rattle me in the same way it used to, but it doesn’t really scare me much at all. And what can you do when you’re not scared of failure? Just about anything.
The point of this article is not to say that if you’re succeeding in school, then you must automatically be lacking in other areas, but rather to highlight that our failures are often an indicator of how far and how often we are willing to push ourselves — and can often yield great returns if we’re willing to learn from them. Once we begin to look at failure as a sign we’re growing, not self-destructing (though enough failure in enough places might be a sign of that — so listen to yourself if you need to lighten the load), we increase our ability to take things on that we could never even imagine ourselves thinking about if we were still locking ourselves in a room from 9 am — 11 pm every day doing nothing but perfecting our ability to balance chemical equations and solve complex calculus problems. Surely, there’s lots to learn in school, but there’s simply way more out there to learn in the world when you come to terms with the fact that in order grow, you might need to fail a little bit. And for many, this might mean getting used to not being obsessed with over-achieving in every academic circumstance, which was the outlook I’ve had to overcome throughout this degree.
When you begin putting more of your energy towards experiences out of your comfort zone, you can develop a more well-rounded and stable identity which is likely to serve you better than choosing to constantly pass up on those same experiences to never see your GPA flicker.
I promise you’ll be okay on the other side.
Coming from a recovering academic over-achiever myself :)