Personal Narrative: Lessons Learned From Failure

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The lessons we take from failure can be fundamental to late success. Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

MY FIRST EVER SPEECH AND DEBATE TOURNAMENT… I sure do remember it well. I was welcomed into a minuscule room with seven hundred teens swarming around in formal attire, sort of intimidating if you ask me. It’s 8AM and my heart is racing. I was running a marathon without even moving a single muscle. It’s that appalling beat that quakes your entire body and makes it irregularly flutter due to over-stimulation. It makes you believe it is excitement until the belly tosses commence. Heat overcomes my face, my neck brutally aches, and I feel awfully dizzy. …show more content…

I have watched countless opportunities slip through my fingers like grains of sand, I never had the courage to close my fist and clutch because not only did I restrict myself from the ability to fail but I refused myself the ability to try. The failure isn’t trying something and it not working out. The failure is not trying at all because everything that didn’t work out for me, in a way of its own, worked out for me. Failure and the lessons learned from these experiences effects most of us in one way or another. For me, this horrific catastrophe benefitted me by overcoming my foe, shyness. A year ago I was so shy, I couldn’t do simple things like raise my hand in class or ask a waiter where the restroom was without feeling like I had to pass out from fear. But, one day, I realized that shyness is nothing more than a fear, a phobia of speaking because I’m afraid of making a mistake or looking stupid, in other words, failing. However, with time, I learned to conquer my fear of failure.
In fact, I learned to embrace my failures. I put those failed tests on the fridge, laughed when I tripped because with each failure I had, the closer I was to success. I would scream, “I DIDN’T MAKE THE TEAM!”, or “I tried to give a speech but then I forgot it and I almost died by tripping on my heels” because life is too short for me to feel ashamed of

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