Home Opinion The Gray Area

The Gray Area

by Jordan Wood

For some, it doesn’t exist. For others, it’s how you learn. But for most, it’s often what defines – and sometimes destroys – them.

Ask anyone what failure is and you’ll get a hodgepodge of answers ranging from “everyone fails” to “I do not believe in failure.” To freshman Abby Frerichs, success is “not necessarily always winning. If you’re in a game and you’re playing a really good team and you set certain goals, but you don’t end up winning but you achieve those goals, you can still feel good about it. You’re always going to get what you give out of what you do. You have to fail to build yourself back up.” Sophomore Angela Andrews added that you must fail in order to succeed. “Everyone fails and makes a mistake,” said Andrews. “Sometimes you can do everything right and sometimes the outcome is not what you want.”

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, failure is “a state of inability to perform a normal function” or “a lack of success.” In other words, you either succeed by completing, or fail if you don’t. There is no in-between; there is no gray area. My question is this: why should success be either black and white? Why can’t it be a gray area? And the answer’s simple: that’s simply not how we are taught.

We grow up hearing things like “failure is the opportunity to begin again” which at first sounds pretty motivational, but think about what it is really implying – if you fail, you must start over. These are the kinds of things planted in our head from a young age, so when we grow up and something doesn’t turn out the way we initially intended, we tally that up as a failure, and that simply shouldn’t be the case. Instead, we should learn about something called “mini-success.”

Mini-successes are when you take a “failure” and look deeper. Look deeper into what went into whatever you were trying to accomplish. Maybe you didn’t do it fast enough, but you did it faster than you had previously. That’s a mini-success. Maybe you struck out swinging, but you swung hard at a pitch in the zone instead of watching it go by. That’s a mini-success.

I leave you with a challenge. I challenge you to find the positive in everything you do. You can no longer judge a success or a failure based on a win or loss. You can no longer say you failed because you didn’t ace your test. You find those questions you didn’t think you knew, but got right. You can no longer say that you failed in a relationship, because it’s a two-way street. You find the growth you made in the process. Follow Frerichs’ advice: “Everyone fails multiple times in life, but it’s just how you build back up to succeed. Try your best, give enough effort, and you won’t fail.”

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