A Good Thing Is Failure Essay

Many people have heard that when a reporter asked how it felt to fail 1,000 times while inventing the lightbulb, Thomas Edison replied, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 1,000 ways that won’t work” (“Why Failure is Good for Success”). Throughout his life Thomas Edison experienced many failures, but he never let them bother him. Rather than getting discouraged, Edison just kept getting back up and continuing on. In an attempt to better express his view of failure Edison stated, “Many of life’s failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up” (Beals). He realized just how important failure, along with how we react to it, can be. It is through failure we learn more about ourselves than we previously knew. Through failure we can also become more prepared to succeed in the future. Failure can be a good thing, as long as we do not let it consume our lives, and expect it to determine our futures. Without failure there would be not excitement or variety in life. Yes, it is true that failure is painful, but because of failure we can come to enjoy the good things life has to offer.
To demonstrate why failure can be a

good thing, in her article “Six Reasons it is Okay to Fail” Loy Alexandra explains why we should not fear failure. Beginning with the first, Loy believes it is okay to fail because failure is indeed inevitable. We will all fail many times throughout our lives. There is nothing we can do to change this fact, no matter how much we want to or how hard we try. She then points out that many people who have achieved fame and success, such as Steve Jobs or Walt Disney, failed on multiple occasions. Even the great American President Abraham Lincoln experienced this. “Before running for office Lincoln became a businessman, but failed. Latter he became a lawyer, yet once again failed. He was even defeated politically many times as he ran to become a legislature, a congressman, the commissioner of the General Land Office, a senator (in 1854 and 1856), and even the vice-president” (Muzik). Despite all these failures Abraham Lincoln never gave up and was eventually elected to be the sixteenth president of the United States.
Second, we will learn much more from our failures than we will from our successes. Through these inevitable failures, we can learn where our weaknesses are, as well as what we will need to do to fix them. Before becoming the President of the American Psychological Association in 2002, Robert Sternberg was forced to learn from failure. As a student at Stanford University, “In his first college introductory-psychology class he received a C. He later went on to graduate with honors” (Muzik). Because he did poorly in this first class Sternberg learned what he needed to pass the class, although very likely the hard way, and went on to achieve great success in his career.
This brings us to Loy’s third point which is failure makes us stronger. Failure will separate those who consider themselves weak from those who consider themselves strong. She says, “Some people fail, and they give up on their goals. Others fail, and they gain invincible strength” (Alexandra). She then explains, “These people can be knocked to the ground, but they’re like those inflatable dolls. They bounce right back up. That’s what failure should do to you. It shouldn’t break or stop you. It should make you push harder to achieve your goals and dreams” (Alexandra). Failure should not knock us down and keep us there. Failure will knock us down so we can know where we need to most improve. Once we are able to get back up we will be stronger and it will be harder to knock us down a second time. Beethoven is perfect proof that these statements are true. While first learning how to play the violin he handled the instrument extremely awkwardly. His teacher even considered him “hopeless.” Though he was initially knocked to the ground Beethoven never gave up. Instead he got right back up and eventually composed five of the world’s most famous symphonies after going deaf. After initially failing on the violin, he grew stronger from his failures and became one of the greatest composers to have lived.
Next, Loy Alexandra says failure can be a good thing when we are unafraid of failing because we will be willing to take more risks. Taking risks, such as trying out for a singing competition or applying for an important job, will make life a much more enjoyable experience. This fourth point was experienced by the actor, musician, and dancer, Fred Astaire. After first being rejected by MGM he went on to be one of the most famous entertainers of his time. He is quoted as saying, “When you’re experimenting, you have to try so many things before you choose what you want, that you go days with nothing but exhaustion. Here is the reward for perseverance: The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed . . . If you make enough of them, it’s considered to be your style” (Muzik). Even though Astaire took major risks and initially failed, he eventually gained the recognition and success he deserved.
The fifth reason Loy believes failure can be a good thing is failure allows us to discover new paths.

When we fail, we may discover the path we are traveling on is not the one we want to continue down. We can then look for new paths and opportunities that would have previously been unknown, had failure not occurred. The creator of the Peanut’s comic strips, Charles Schultz, learned that failure will take you down new and previously undiscovered paths from an early age. “While still in high school every comic he submitted to his high school yearbook was turned down. Later, when applying for a job under Walt Disney he was similarly turned away” (Muzik). Had Schulz worked for the Disney Company, the beloved characters of Charlie Brown, Lucy, Sally, Linus, and of course Snoopy would very likely not

exist.
Loy’s sixth and final reason failure can be a good thing is perhaps the most important. It is through failure our successes will be even sweeter. She asks, “How can you know the sweet taste of success if you’ve never felt the sting of failure” (Alexandra). Without going through failures, improving upon those failures, and making ourselves better, we can never really be happy with what we have accomplished. Babe Ruth is considered to be one of the greatest baseball players of all time. He understood that success is so much better because of failure. Most baseball fans know that Babe Ruth held the home run record for a long time with a career total of 714. What many fans do not know is he also held the career strikeout record with 1,330. Because he knew he struck out so many times, Babe Ruth was proud of his homeruns, as he knew how hard he had to work for them.
Until a few years ago, there have been few studies that provide reliable information about the positive effects of failure. The information that was out there was all based on speculation. Despite this, scientists have now released new findings that suggest when students in school accept the fact that it is okay to fail, they will actually receive better grades. In the first of three experiments, scientists split 111 students into three groups. The first group was given an assignment and the teacher explained that they should expect to fail the test as they would not know the answers to all the questions. Unlike the first group, the second and third groups were not told this. The results showed that those who were told to expect to fail did significantly better than those who were just told to complete the test. Frederique Autin, who was the lead scientist during this study reported, “By being obsessed with success, students are afraid to fail, so they are reluctant to take difficult steps to master new material” (Strauss). By allowing them to realize they were not expected to do well on their test, the first group of students scored higher than their classmates from the second and third groups.
Jean-Claud Croize, who was also involved in this study, further claims, “People usually believe that academic achievement simply reflects students’ inherent academic ability, which can be difficult to change. But teachers and parents may be able to help students succeed just by changing the way in which material is presented” (Strauss). Student success will be more highly achieved, if teachers, parents, and students realize that getting a bad grade on one or two assignments will be okay. Getting a low score on a just a few assignments will help students learn what they missed. It will also help teachers know what course material they need to focus on in the classroom.
In a similar study, it has been shown that fear of failure can affect students in other ways as well, yet the subject of this study is interesting. It was geared toward parents, not the students themselves. This second study was performed by Jessica Lahey. She was concerned about the effect that ‘helicopter parenting’ will have on children and young adults as they get older and begin making major decisions on their own.
Lahey spent over a decade teaching both middle and high school aged children. These students became the subjects of her study. Lahey found that when parents do not give their children an opportunity to fail, parents are taking important learning opportunities away from them. In her article Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail Lahey wrote, “Every single time we turn around and say, ‘I’ll do that for you’ or ‘Here let me help you with that,’ we are saying to them, ‘I don’t think you can do that for yourself . . . and that is really damaging over time” (Wallace). Through her study Lahey has found that when students graduate from high school and move on to college, they do not know how to do things on their own.
Additional studies have shown that parents who do not let their children learn from failure can also experience intense anxiety, depression, and a low sense of competence. These children will also become extremely dependent upon their parents and can develop neurotic behavior. Even more studies have also shown that adults who reported being over parented when younger experience serious doubts about their ability to overcome life’s challenges, even now that they have moved out of their childhood homes.
As can be seen, failure is not always a bad thing. While it should not be allowed to consume your life, there are actually many benefits to failure. Through failure, we can learn new things, strengthen our weaknesses, overcome challenges, and even find experiences that will make life more exciting. Additionally, by realizing that it is okay to fail, we can teach our children how to become more confident as we allow them to learn from their failures as well.