Parting Shot

I meant to post this awhile ago and know it's been in various venues, but I've thought of it a lot over the summer and it seems to make sense for it to go here as well as I launch off on the next chapter of my life:

Learning to Fail

In the admissions office, the same message has been repeated to prospective students for years. It is a message that I wrote in my college essay four years ago, but I never fully understood until I came through the Harvard experience: Don’t be afraid to experience failure.

It is hard for me to analyze my Harvard experience without analyzing the failures I experienced. I could put a rosy glow on everything, but if I did not allow myself to look at those moments where I made mistakes, I would lack the perspective I have today.

During my freshman year, I took an upper-level philosophy class on existentialism. Since then, I have tried to live my life in accordance with Nietzsche’s principle of eternal recurrence: Live life such that you would want to live each moment over again, every detail the same. But I have come to discover that this philosophy is incomplete. Life is about more than simply living with no regrets. It is about learning from the regrets that you do have and realizing which moments are the ones you should cherish.

Harvard hasn’t been easy, and it is not supposed to be. It is that first freshman seminar that you applied to but were rejected from. The a capella group that the vast majority of people who tried out for didn’t get in to. The production you weren’t cast in, and the team you didn’t make. There are the professors who wouldn’t advise your thesis, the funding that didn’t come through, the fellowship or job that you weren’t offered. Here, we have learned to experience failure, because it is impossible to succeed at everything at once. Whether those failures were in the classroom, in tryouts, or even in a fight with a friend, we would be remiss if we said that we had made it through the Harvard experience without learning that we cannot always succeed.

But often, these failures result in the greatest rewards, and we end up learning from the risks that gave rise to them. When I wrote my application to Harvard, I tried to communicate that I was a happy and confident person. I believed myself happy and confident back then, but the extent to which I know myself is much deeper today. In choosing to come here, I made the decision to take myself out of the environment I was familiar with and go somewhere where I would not know everything. I lived with a diverse group of people I love, and I learned new things every day. I didn’t do everything right, but I don’t think that anyone did, even if that is the image they hope to project.

And four years later, my happiness is genuine, but the confidence that I possess is more than a simple optimism fed by success; it is the confidence to try, to risk failure, and to get back up again.

I credit Harvard for teaching me this, above all other things. In an institution that glorifies conventional notions of success, I believe the most important thing I learned here was how to fail. Failures are not the prettiest moments, and on graduation day, one is reluctant to remember crying over a poor Expository Writing grade or the emotional crisis of the first month of freshman year. Yet, without these moments, I would not be so proud of where I am today. I would not have felt as much joy in my grade on the next paper. I would not be so proud of the many things that I have accomplished here. They may not be a laundry list of awards, but these successes are things that I have worked for—achievements with efforts and stories behind them.

Harvard is a place that rewards success, and during senior spring in particular, these awards proliferate. Suddenly it seems that everything can be divided into Summas, Phi Beta Kappas, Hoopes prizes, and prestigious fellowships. But this is not the entire Harvard experience. The Harvard experience entails understanding and experiencing failure. It is comprised of students rising from that failure, overcoming that fear, and excelling in spite of it. That environment—made up of students who experienced few failures before college and have been humbled by Harvard—makes this school the amazing place that it is. I only hope that, in a place where excellence abounds, Harvard College never loses sight of the importance of failing.