Fail Better

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...

Failure is always viewed as a negative consequence. People always assume that failing is the end of the world, a horrible thing to do, and can do no good. I want to propose the opposite: Failure is Your Best Friend. For most people, this is a love-hate relationship, and that is perfectly fine, but anything less than that, is so much worse. Despising failure will take you nowhere. It is only when we use the failings to our advantage can we be truly successful. Someone who went through so many trial and error attempts used his for betterment, not his defeat. Thomas Edison, accredited with creating the light bulb, did not get it right on the first time, nor the second or third. Instead it took him 1,000 tries, and instead of discouragement he stated this when asked about it: “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.” He used those failures as part of the process, and then he created light bulbs. The World Economic Forum shares much information about u...