It was the beginning of my spring break, I had decided that I would leave everything about Quarter 3 behind in hopes to have a refreshing break and an explosive Quarter 4. Specifically, it was the Monday night of my spring break and I was in my room watching a movie when I felt a *bzzz* in my pocket. I saw it was an email from Sarah, so I unlocked my phone to view what I thought was the worst email I could have gotten during my spring break. She had labeled my project a failure since I didn’t have any substantial work done; to make up for the points I was given an alternative assignment for Quarter 4 on top of my regular work.
I was ashamed of myself. How could I have let my procrastination reach a point like this? All of my classmates had finished their projects, yet here I was with a failed project and more work than what I had before. I had failed, and not only failed myself and my project, but failed Sarah too. I thought a failure was just that; a failure. It isn’t until now when I am looking back at that moment in appreciation. I didn’t know it at the time, but my project failure was one of the greatest successes I have had as a person. The alternative work was to write an essay about my “failure factors,” to give a presentation to successful people analyzing my failure, and to interview 5+ successful people (with no ties to Chinquapin) about their failures.
The essay’s main goal was for me to reflect back on what caused me to fail. As I was preparing the outline I thought of those fail factors, my fail factors. It came down to four overall problems that I not only had with this project but as a student as well: Time Management, Procrastination, Loss of Interest, and Lack of Communication. The presentation’s main goal was to have outside sources help me understand my fail factors and learn how to counter them in the future. The interviews were meant so that I can learn from others' mistakes so that I don’t have to learn from my own mistakes.
Each part of my alternative completion assignment had one thing in common, that was to learn from mistakes and failures. What each of my interviewees stated was that a failure is only a failure if you don’t accept it and learn from it. When I learned this, I took it in a specific way. “A failure is not considered a failure if you learn from it. It is a learned lesson.” On the surface, me not completing my project is a failure, but once I broke it down and put thought into it I now realize it is more of a success than if I did complete it. I learned more about myself as a person with this failure than I would have learned if I did complete my project and that is why I feel like it was a greater success. I can take this knowledge of myself with me and use it to my advantage in the future.
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