Fail Better

Click here for Video  

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...

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...

In this post, I want to emphasize the importance of stepping away and taking breaks, whether it is in failure prevention or recovery, taking a moment can make all the difference when it comes to failure. In a preventive measure, taking a break and coming back refreshed can lead to greater success. Sometimes we all get caught up in hurrying to finish things and that means that sometimes we rush, or do not give proper effort to said things. The amount of time or kind of break depends on what fits into the situation. It can be in the middle or anytime, and it simply serves as a small distractor to come back and focus once more on the task at hand. This practice is seen in many instances. Take for example, large tests like the ACT, SAT, MCAT and many others, these tests all offer types of breaks ranging in the number of minutes, and the number of times they are taken. Those small breaks can give the needed time to reorganize thoughts and give time from constantly looking at the words on th...

Being a leader takes many things, communication skills, organization, people skills, patience, and well planning, and typically leadership is shown as a sideways pyramid. Keeping everyone as equal, with one person overseeing the entire whole. This very traditional way of viewing leadership is almost outdated. In a recent TEDTalk given by Lorna Davis on leadership, she discusses this and how it can be almost detrimental. Davis’s idea is that independent leadership is not the solution, she states “t he idea that one person has the answer is ludicrous. It's not only ineffective, it's dangerous,” she goes on to talk about how we need one another, and because of the interconnectedness of our world and society, that a single person holding all the answers is nearly impossible. It’s a typical superhero approach, and can lack so many aspects of being a good leader. Collaborative leadership allows for a network of individuals to have a say together, finding solutions that solve the is...

Whenever you think “it can’t get worse” or “this must be rock bottom” it inevitably tends to get worse. It can be small minuscule tasks, or large things, rock bottom, is not actually the bottom. This post is slightly more related to life than it is failure, but it teaches an important lesson. The lesson that I am trying to share has to do with how we view our situations. There is a slim chance that I will manage to have a good and successful way if I go around saying “well, it couldn’t get worse.” I have a story to go along with the post. It was from my senior year of high school. I was running late for school - well late to my standards - and I was rushing out the door. When I got in my car, I was driving too fast, and hit the curb on the corner of my street. I ended up popping the tire and throwing off the alignment of my car. I thought the day truly could not get worse, and I said that very thing out loud, next thing I knew I had a surprise quiz in Calculus, which didn’t go my way....

Growth is not linear, neither is progress. I cannot start something today, and only see positive results moving forward, and so many people are stuck under that expectation that they will always get a positive result. That is so far from true, growth is not a once track path to the top, but filled with many ups and downs along the way. By the time success is reached, the path to get there will look more like a roller coaster than a staircase. So many people get discouraged and feel like failures when in reality, they do not understand that growth is not linear, and will not happen from simply trying one time. There are ups and downs to reaching success, and I, like many others have experienced them in my life and the endeavors that I choose. I want to share a brief story about a time when I didn’t have a growth mindset, and that was during my senior year of high school. I was taking an advanced class, Calculus I and II, it was an experience to say the least. We were talking about some ...

As part of the Theodore Roosevelt Honors Leadership Program, it is only fitting to include some wise words from one of our past presidents. I have chosen two quotes taken from “The Strenuous Life” to share how Roosevelt viewed and spoke about failure. (see text here) In these two quotes during his address it is clear that Roosevelt never let failure stop him, or define him throughout his life. Both quotes are more than advice but serve as a way of life that allows one to not view failure in fear but in ambition.  The first quote: “I t is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.” When I read this I immediately think that he is reminding the audience that if there is no effort, then there is no chance for success. If the fear of failing, or not wanting to experience failure is so great that it inhibits us from trying, that is to Roosevelt worse than failing. I happen to agree with that statement, if I try and fail, I at least learned something, but if I give up ...

I know I am not the only one that is guilty of going on social media and seeing everyone posting their best lives to find myself feeling sorry for myself. I see everyone traveling to sunny beaches or out with their friends in classy outfits. Sometimes the couples photos or even fancy dessert pictures make me feel like I am missing out. Like my life is not as good because I don’t have ultra edited pictures or thousands of likes on my posts. However, that is not reality, the things on social media that we get jealous of or envy are not those people’s reality. No one wants to post the bad things, or even the subpar things in their lives. I do this too, I try to only post the best pictures or things that I know will get likes. One of my favorite features of instagram is hiding the like count. I started doing this on all of my posts and I would have to go through a lot more work to find out how many people saw it. I have been able to put my phone away and not worry about it. I also started ...

This title may seem controversial, but it is a concept that I think can help when it comes to the mindset surrounding failure. I want to note that I do not think failing is a waste of time, but the fear, the angst, and the “what if” questions are less than helpful. It is inevitable to have some anxiety about things, especially when the stakes are high, but when that gets in the way of execution, it becomes a waste of time. I am going to share two examples from my high school speech career, both of these examples are about times I was scared of failure, but the difference is the mindset and the followthrough after that fear filled my mind.  I typically chose public speaking events, where writing my own speeches was the whole concept. When I picked a topic and started writing, I was terrified, “what if I don’t place?” “what if the judge hates it?” “what if I mess up” questions like this filled my mind, and when the time came for the speech meet, I failed. At the awards ceremony my na...

Hey there! Before I jump into the details of my blog, I wanted to share a little bit about myself, and my purpose for writing this as well. My name is Madison Beckler, and I am from Bismarck, North Dakota. I am the youngest of four siblings, two brothers and one sister. I have 4 nieces and nephews. I n May of 2022 I graduated from St. Mary’s Central High School, our class was relatively small, roughly 80 students. Some of my hobbies include listening to music, being outdoors and scrolling on Pinterest for recipes and DIY projects. My time outside is spent at my family’s cabin on Lake Tschida. There I like to kayak, paddle board, go on boat rides, jet ski, fish, and relax with my family. My family is very important to me, and I spent a lot of time with both my immediate and extended family. I also try to live my life being the best person I can be, helping others when I can and even holding onto some core values that help me to be the best version of myself. Some of the values I rely he...