Why You Need This For Success
My science teacher hands me back this test with a look of total disgust. An, are you f**king kidding me? look.
I got a D. It was embarrassing. I never showed it to my parents.
They stopped asking for my grades after a while. Like they knew better. I think that was in 7th or 8th grade. That was the nail in the coffin for my academic career. From then-on it’d just be an embarrassing spate of total-whiffs and the why did you even show up? sort of questions.
I continued doing it for another eight years or so. Yawn.
My sister, on the other hand, has been in school for pretty much forever, and always excelled. She loves it. She’s a total masochist. She loves it even when it’s really difficult. Or when people tell her no, you can’t come to our school! She finds someone else who will say yes.
She’s been doing that for years. She’s going to be a doctor. It’s inevitable.She decided that years ago, and despite various setbacks and questions like, do I really want to do this? she’s pushed through it. Yes, I want to do this, she says, so she keeps pushing through the failures and the setbacks.
She has this little thing called grit.
Why Children Succeed
“The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure,” Randolph told me. “And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.” -- Paul Tough, How Children Succeed
Successful children aren't ones who have figured out how to avoid failure. In fact, quite the opposite.
We’ve developed and established a strong culture of not failing, in America. Despite that whole American Dream idea, we often neglect that failure part. Failing at anything is a serious taboo. Failing at business is bad. Quitting is bad. Doing things that don’t work is, well, bad. Shame on you for trying that!
Corporate America is pretty much built on this idea of, come here, work for 40+ years and you’ll be stable. We won’t fail! Everything will be okay!
The collapse in 2008 put the kibosh on that, though. Nothing is safe, now.
By failing to accept failure, we’ve created an environment that can often lack innovation, good ideas and be totally inhibiting for professional development because we're gotten very, very afraid.
Failure is part of the learning process.
The problem is that nobody has grit anymore. There is no course in school on how to develop grit (well, at least not the typical school).
And research shows (Which Traits Predict Success? (The Importance of Grit)) that grit is, more often than not, one of the top indicators for success.
And we our unhealthy relationship with failure, of dropping the ball on things and unreasonable expectations, that needs to go, too.
Because failure teaches us how to be the Bari’s (you know, like my sister) of the world.