Fail Better

While I have enjoyed sharing my  stories and works of wisdom on failure through this blog, I want to wrap up everything that I have shared and leave one last message for dealing with failures. I have not only shared my personal stories of things I have failed at, but also given many tips and tricks. Each of my posts shares something different, but the overall theme comes down to mindset. How we think about things. Having a positive and motivated mindset makes all the difference when it comes to how we face failure, respond to failure, and work to prevent failure. If you think that you will fail at something, you likely will fail at that thing. But if you go in with a mindset that you could be successful, that you are going to try, it will be so much more fruitful for you. Even after failure, we can change how we view and how we see things. I can choose to use failure and learn from it. I can step back, and see what went wrong. I can begin to figure out how to move forward.  No...

Failure is fundamental to our success. While it may seem counterintuitive, it is very much true. There are so many things that I would not have ever become successful in had I not first failed, one of those is studying. I have found school to be pretty easy, and minimal studying got me by more times than I could count. However, this minimal studying didn’t work in more challenging classes, and my first test score really made that evident. While I did not fail the test entirely, my score was significantly lower than any of my past class averages on tests. I knew something needed to change because that minimal study time was not going to fly for the rest of the year. I had to learn new study habits. Building new habits took a lot of time, more than I want to admit, but after some time, I finally was able to study properly and my test scores increased as well. Some of the habits that I had to change were how I used my time studying, and I had to start spreading it out over a few days whic...

So many times when I experience failures I hate taking responsibility for them, I would rather just make excuses for why something didn’t work or why I failed. While a lot of that is mindset, there is part that is purely maturity. Oftentimes we blame the lack of something perhaps, lack of knowledge, lack of ability, or skill, or resources. While some of those are true in many instances of failures, in many cases the problem is slacking. Did I have the time or the ability to gain knowledge, skill, or resources and choose not to? That would be slacking. When people make a conscious choice to avoid something that could help them later on, that is on them, not other people, not on lacking what they need. I do not like the word laziness because there can be a number of reasons why someone did or didn’t do something for the benefit. However, I go back to maturity, because that has a lot to do with how we react in situations and how we go about fixing them. I have two short stories to share a...

Throughout each of my blog posts, I have tried to make it clear that failure is inevitable, it is bound to happen to everyone at some point in life. And while it is unavoidable, there are ways to make it seem manageable. When people experience failures in their lives, whether it be due to work, or relationships, parenting, people tend to feel like their life is over. Some feel as though there is no recovery for failure, it is simply the end. However, that is not true at all. I have mentioned in many other posts that there are ways to overcome failure, and I have shared personal stories to help show that. In this post, I want to emphasize Recognize and Respond hence the title. Recognize and Respond is a basic method with two steps. 1.) Recognize, in this step we stop, and are seeing failure happening. We are looking at what is happening, how it is happening, and why it is happening. Understanding those key parts helps to understand how to move forward to the next step. 2.) Response, thi...

Throughout the posts on this blog, I have shared many personal stories, and really emphasized that failure is inevitable. It is seemingly unavoidable and at some point in time we will all experience it. In this post, I will share some different soft skills and how they can help prevent failure from occurring all together, or at least make it less severe. While having soft skills may not be a “fix-all” solution, they are great to have and can be very beneficial. Anything a person does requires both hard and soft skills. How I understand this is that hard skills relate directly to the task at hand, and soft skills serve as the extra things. I use this in both Biology and Chemistry labs, the hard skills would be understanding how to follow the procedure and what needs to be done. Soft skills would be how well I can communicate to my group or partner about the procedure and task. I need to have both types of skills to be successful in the lab.  Some valuable soft skills include effecti...