essay about failure

Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

How to Learn From Your Failures

Sooner or later, everyone fails at something. But does everyone learn from their failures? In fact, the evidence suggests that most people struggle to grow from mistakes and defeats.

When researchers Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach developed the “Facing Failure” game, they wanted to test how well people learn from failure. The game consists of successive rounds of multiple-choice questions, where feedback from earlier rounds can help you perform better in later rounds—and getting more correct answers means making more money.

However, across many different studies, the researchers have consistently found that people “underlearn” from failure in the game. In fact, people continue to not learn from errors even as the incentives to do so increase.

“Even when participants had the chance to earn a learning bonus that was 900% larger than the participation payment, players learned less from failure than success,” they write. It’s a result echoed by other studies. The “ostrich effect” describes the tendency for investors to stop checking their stocks when market value tumbles—whereas they’ll compulsively do so when things are going well. One 2012 study found that novices often avoid negative performance feedback.

Why do people avoid the lessons of failure? That’s the question Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach explored in a recent paper published by Perspectives on Psychological Science . They find a host of emotional and cognitive obstacles to learning from failure—and they provide concrete steps to overcoming them.

Overcoming feelings of failure

Failure bruises the ego, that metaphorical seat of our self-esteem and self-importance. When we fail, we feel threatened—and that sense of threat can trigger a fight-or-flight response.

“Fight” in the context of failure looks like wholesale dismissal of the value of the task, or criticism of the people involved or the unfairness of the situation you faced. However, “flight” might be the more common response to failure. When we flee failure, we disengage our attention from the task that threatens our sense of ourselves as effective people.

In a series of six experiments published in 2020, Hallgeir Sjåstad, Roy Baumeister, and Michael Ent randomly assigned participants to receive good or bad feedback on a cognitive test or academic performance. They found that participants who initially failed at a task predicted that succeeding in the future would make them less happy than it actually did—and they tended to dismiss the goals of the tests. The researchers coin the term “sour grapes effect” to describe this kind of response.

How do we make failure less threatening to the ego? Research offers a few suggestions.

Observe other people’s failures. In their paper, Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach propose removing the ego from failure as much as possible by looking at other people’s failures first, before you take on a task yourself. In one of their studies, half of participants got lessons from other people’s negative results in the Facing Failure game before playing it themselves—and learned more from those failures than they did from their own. In other words, when you set out to learn out to ski, it will probably help to watch YouTube videos about common mistakes, before you hit the slopes yourself.

Get some distance. If negative emotions are getting in the way of your understanding, they also suggest trying self-distancing techniques . This involves thinking of your personal experience from the outside perspective of a neutral third party, asking, “Why did Jeremy fail?” instead of “Why did I fail?” While that might sound cheesy, it seems to work. As Amy L. Eva writes in Greater Good :

According to  research , when people adopt a self-distanced perspective while discussing a difficult event, they make better sense of their reactions, experience less emotional distress, and display fewer physiological signs of stress. In the long term, they also experience reduced reactivity when remembering the same problematic event weeks or months later, and they are less vulnerable to recurring thoughts (or rumination).

It may also help to write about the failure in the third person or from the point of view of a future self who is looking back on the failure.

Share your own failure story. People tend to hide their own failures, out of a sense of shame, but there are ways to turn failure into success by transforming it into a story of growth.

In a series of 2018 and 2019 studies with Angela Duckworth, Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach asked people to turn failures in different domains like work, fitness, or school into inspirational stories for others. This often fueled success down the line. High school students who shared failures with middle school students went on to get better grades than those who didn’t reframe their failures; middle schoolers who gave advice to elementary school students later spent more time on homework.

How can adults apply these insights to real life? If you’re a manager, for example, consider sharing your mistakes with employees in helping them improve their own performance—which will help them (as well as you) learn from failure.

Recognize your successes. There are other ways to shore up your own ego. Studies consistently find that experts are better able to tolerate failure in their fields, in part because they have a past history of accomplishment and future predicated on commitment.

In a 2014 experiment , seventh-grade teachers paired constructive criticism with encouraging notes that reminded students of the ability and skill they’d already demonstrated in class, which led to better grades in the future. Studies suggest teachers can also reframe failure as success by making learning the goal, as one 2019 study found.

This insight can obviously be applied to the workplace, as well: Managers can take steps to build up the egos of employees in feedback, by reminding them of how far they’ve come. They can also make learning one of the goals of any project, to encourage progress away from any missteps.

Feel the disappointment. If all else fails, try just feeling sad over your mistakes and defeats. There is a great deal of research suggesting that sadness evolved as a response to failure and loss, and that it exists in order to encourage us to reflect on our experiences. Sadness seems to improve memory and judgment, which can help us to succeed in the future; regret can actually sharpen motivation. When children reach the developmental stage when they can experience regret, suggests one 2014 study , they’re more likely to learn more from failure.

Thinking beyond failure

Beyond the emotional challenge to our ego, failure also presents a cognitive challenge, meaning that information from failure can be harder to process than successful experiences. “Whereas success points to a winning strategy, from failure people need to infer what not to do,” write Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach.

In a complex 2020 experiment , they presented participants with three boxes, each containing an imaginary large success, a moderate success, and a small failure, with real monetary awards attached to each choice. They structured the game so that the rewards would be greatest with choosing the failure scenario, because the failure contains better information: “Learning the location of the losing box statistically raises a player’s winnings more than revealing the location of the moderate win, because knowing to avoid the failure guarantees a larger gain.”

The results? One third of the participants were not able to see that the imaginary failure contained better information, which would ultimately lead to more money for them. “Even when ‘failure’ is a reveal, not an actual failure—and thus, not at all ego-threatening—people struggle to see that failure contains useful information,” they write.

It’s not too hard to see what’s going on in experiments like those: Ego aside, we all need to make a realistic assessment about whether a task is worth our time and effort. Initial failure sends a signal that a task might not provide a return on investment; thus, we naturally bend in the direction of success, even when the success story has nothing to do with us. So how do we get our brains to pay more attention to the lessons that come from failure?

More on Failure

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Find out how mindfulness can help students cope with failure .

Focus on the long-term goal. Often, we need to ask ourselves: Will my failures lead to rewards down the line? That’s why goals and commitments are important for overcoming the cognitive barriers to learning from failure. Holding a clear long-term goal in mind—such as becoming a doctor or learning to sail—can help us to tolerate short-term failure and override information-avoidance.

Practice mindfulness. “There is yet another reason failure often contains superior information: failure violates expectations,” Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach write. Because people almost never intend to fail, failure can be surprising, which has the happy effect of waking up our brains—and a brain that is awake learns more than a brain that’s sleepwalking. When you feel surprised by failure, take that as a signal to be mindful and to sit with it rather than ignoring it. Indeed, multiple studies suggest that practicing mindfulness —that is, cultivating nonjudgmental awareness of thoughts and experiences—can help you to grow from failure.

Reflect on the lessons you learned. Because failure requires more interpretation and thinking than success if we’re to learn from it, Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach suggest reducing mental loads as much as possible in its wake.

In one version of their Facing Failure game, the researchers highlight lessons from failure: “TAKE NOTE: there were only two answer choices to the question. Based on the feedback above, you can learn the correct answer! It is whichever choice you did not select initially.” You can do this on your own by distilling lessons into notes for yourself: “I failed at my math test because I didn’t study long enough. Therefore, I need to study longer—at least four hours!”

Do less. Finally, they suggest increasing our capacity to learn by engaging in fewer tasks that present opportunities for failure. In other words, if you’re learning to do something hard, you might need to prioritize that ahead of other, easier tasks, simply taking one thing at a time. Repetition helps, too. In other words, practice makes perfect—or at least good enough .

Practice self-compassion . Many people believe that they should be hard on themselves in the wake of failure; after all, how else would you grow? In fact, many recent studies suggest that you’re more likely to grow if you speak kindly to yourself, as a loved one might speak to you, in the wake of failure.

Along with self-kindness, there’s another component of self-compassion worth mentioning: common humanity. This is the awareness of our connection with other people and the universality of human experience. Failure is one of those human experiences, because it’s inevitable. It’s not a question of if you’ll fail—it’s when. The only real question you need to answer is what you can learn from the experience.

Well, there might be one more question to ask yourself: whether to keep the failure to yourself or turn it into a lesson for others. That can be scary, but, as Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach argue, “The information in failure is a public good. When it is shared, society benefits.”

About the Author

Jeremy Adam Smith

Uc berkeley.

Jeremy Adam Smith edits the GGSC's online magazine, Greater Good . He is also the author or coeditor of five books, including The Daddy Shift , Are We Born Racist? , and (most recently) The Gratitude Project: How the Science of Thankfulness Can Rewire Our Brains for Resilience, Optimism, and the Greater Good . Before joining the GGSC, Jeremy was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University.

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Ultimate Guide to Writing a College Essay about Failure

Writing about failure can be daunting, especially when it comes to college essays. Many students feel the need to present themselves as perfect, without flaws or mistakes. However, failure is a natural part of life and can often lead to growth and personal development. In this guide, we’ll explore how to write a college essay about failure and turn it into a powerful and compelling story.

1. Define what failure means to you

Defining what failure means to you is the first step in writing a college essay about failure. This involves taking some time to reflect on your personal experiences and how you perceive failure. Failure can mean different things to different people, and it's important to understand how you view it in order to effectively write about it.

Some people view failure as a setback or a defeat, while others view it as an opportunity for growth and learning. Some may see it as a necessary part of the journey towards success, while others may feel discouraged and demotivated by it. Whatever your perspective on failure may be, it's important to be honest with yourself and reflect on how it has impacted your life.

As you define what failure means to you, think about specific examples from your life that demonstrate your perspective. This could be a time when you failed to achieve a goal, made a mistake, or experienced a significant setback. Reflect on how you felt in that moment and how it affected you in the short and long term. This can help you better understand your relationship with failure and how you can write about it in a meaningful way in your college essay.

2. Choose the right experience to write about

When it comes to writing a college essay about failure, choosing the right experience to write about is crucial. You need to pick a failure that is significant enough to be interesting to the admissions officers, but also something that you are comfortable sharing.

One strategy is to think about a time when you failed to meet your own expectations, whether it was in school, in sports, or in your personal life. This kind of failure can be particularly powerful because it shows a willingness to take risks and set ambitious goals for yourself.

Another approach is to reflect on a time when you faced a difficult challenge or obstacle and were not able to overcome it. This could be a failure in an academic setting, such as a poor grade on an exam, or a failure in your personal life, such as the end of a relationship or a family conflict.

Whatever experience you choose, be sure to focus on the lessons you learned from the failure and how it has helped you grow and develop as a person. Admissions officers are looking for applicants who are self-aware, reflective, and able to learn from their mistakes.

3. Describe the experience in detail

When writing a college essay about failure, it is important to describe the experience in detail. This means not only discussing what happened, but also how you felt, what you learned, and how it has affected you.

One way to do this is to use descriptive language. Instead of simply stating what happened, try to paint a picture with your words. Use sensory details to help the reader visualize the experience and understand the impact it had on you.

For example, if you are writing about failing a test, don't just say "I got a bad grade." Instead, describe the feelings you had when you saw the grade, how it made you feel about yourself, and how it affected your motivation to do better in the future.

It is also important to be honest and authentic when describing the experience. Don't try to make yourself look better or downplay the impact of failure. Admissions officers want to see that you can reflect on your experiences and learn from them, even when things don't go according to plan.

Overall, by providing a detailed and honest description of your experience, you can help the reader understand how failure has shaped you as a person and why it is an important topic to write about in a college essay.

4. Reflect on what you learned

When writing a college essay about failure, it's essential to reflect on what you learned from the experience. It's not enough to merely describe the failure; you need to demonstrate how it impacted you and what you gained from it.

Start by examining the experience and what led to the failure. What were the circumstances that led to it, and what were your reactions? How did you feel at the time, and how did those feelings change over time? Did the failure have any long-term effects on you, or did it change the way you approach similar situations?

Next, think about what you learned from the experience. Did the failure reveal any weaknesses or blind spots in your skills or approach? Did it force you to confront any personal biases or beliefs? Did it teach you anything about resilience, perseverance, or risk-taking? Reflect on how the experience changed your perspective, and what you can do differently moving forward.

It's important to avoid falling into the trap of merely presenting the failure as a story with a tidy ending. Instead, use the essay as an opportunity to showcase your ability to think critically and reflectively. Admissions officers want to see that you have the capacity to learn and grow from your mistakes and that you can apply those lessons to future challenges. By demonstrating your ability to do so, you can turn a difficult experience into a powerful and persuasive essay.

5. Emphasize the positive

When writing about failure in a college essay, it's important to emphasize the positive aspects that came out of the experience. Admissions officers want to see that you learned from your failure and grew as a person.

Start by describing the positive things that came out of the experience. Did you gain a new perspective on something? Did you learn a valuable lesson? Did you develop a new skill? Highlighting the positives shows that you are able to take something negative and turn it into a positive.

For example, if you failed a test, you could talk about how you used that experience to improve your study habits and ultimately become a better student. Or if you failed to win a sports championship, you could discuss how you used that experience to become a better athlete, teammate, and leader.

Remember to focus on how you grew and what you learned from the experience, rather than dwelling on the negative aspects of the failure. This will show admissions officers that you are resilient, adaptable, and able to turn challenges into opportunities.

6. Be authentic

When writing about failure, it's important to be honest and authentic in your essay. Don't try to portray yourself as a perfect person who never fails because that's simply not true. Admissions officers are looking for authenticity in your writing, and they can often tell when an essay is insincere or embellished.

Instead, focus on being genuine and vulnerable in your essay. Share your real emotions and thoughts about the experience you're writing about. Talk about how it made you feel and what you learned from it. Share any insights you gained or how it has affected you since then. This will show the admissions officers that you are self-aware and able to reflect on your experiences, which are important qualities for any college student.

Remember that being authentic doesn't mean you have to overshare or be too personal. It's okay to set boundaries and not share every detail of your experience. The key is to strike a balance between being open and honest while still maintaining some privacy and dignity.

In addition, avoid using cliches or generic language in your essay. Instead, use specific details and examples to illustrate your points. This will make your essay more memorable and engaging to read.

Overall, being authentic in your essay will help you stand out from the crowd and show admissions officers that you are a real person with real experiences and insights to share.

Writing about failure in a college essay may seem daunting, but it can be an opportunity to showcase your personal growth and resilience. By defining what failure means to you, choosing the right experience, describing it in detail, reflecting on what you learned, emphasizing the positive, and being authentic, you can craft a powerful and effective essay that demonstrates your character and potential. Remember that failure is a part of life, and it's how you respond to it that matters most. Use this guide to approach your essay with confidence and authenticity.

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College 101

Common app 2: failure and success.

The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

I've never been comfortable bragging. In fact, I was raised to be modest about my achievements, whatever they might be. Applying for college is nothing but bragging, and it makes me uncomfortable. In addition, every other essay you're likely to see is nothing but a litany of impressive accomplishments from top to bottom. That's not me.

At least, that's not me yet. Those applicants who have already tasted far-reaching success are pretty well-formed as people. They already know what works and see no reason to change. Why should they? They already invented a new form of pizza. They have life figured out, or sincerely believe they do. They are wrong. There is no better teacher than failure.

Think about it for a second. Wisdom is what you get from experience. Experience is what you get from failure. The transitive property works out from there. I know this because I failed and it turned me around in a way that modest or even spectacular success could not have. It all started with a D.

Getting a D probably isn't the worst thing in the world, but it's not something anyone wants to see, let alone put, on a college application. It came back to me, scrawled in red, on the first big history test of the year. The one the teacher had assured us was a third of our grade. I could already see my chances of a four-year college going up in smoke and my school year hadn't even started yet.

What happened? I'm not a D student. I'll get the occasional C as well as the occasional A. D's are out of character for me, and enough of a stomach punch to really get my attention. The short version is, I didn't study, and I don't remember precisely why. There is always a reason not to study, isn't there? I didn't study and I went into a test woefully unprepared and got beaten up.

I had two options here. I could accept that I was in fact a D student despite what I had thought. Or I could study hard for the next test and try to bring my grade up by the force of the average. I realized something pretty important: while I had already forgotten the reason I didn't study, I never forgot the grade. Thus, the grade itself was far more important than whatever it was I was doing instead.

Imagine, instead, if I had gotten a C or even a B. It would have taken sheer, blind luck, but it could have happened. If this had happened, if I had succeeded rather than failed, I would have learned nothing. Or, at the very least, I would have learned that I didn't have to study, which is the opposite of what any college-bound senior should learn.

I chose to work harder. By my failure, that D, I had already learned the consequences of not studying. I knew both the problem and the solution. It didn't make it easy. I steadily brought my grade up with subsequent tests and papers.

At the end of the year, I got a better grade than I should have, based on strict averages. The teacher weighted improvement over other concerns. Those who buckled down and worked harder as the year progressed were rewarded.

In essence, my hard work paid off twice over. Had I not failed, I would have learned nothing. I might have done much worse on a later test, since I "knew" studying was not important. Instead, by failing, I was able to right my course. Going into college, I have concrete experience with just how important hard work can be.

Okay, I might be bragging a little bit.

Why This Essay Works

This essay is a good example of how to turn an ostensible weakness into a strength. The writer takes a prompt, which explicitly acknowledges a failure of some kind, and shows how it leads to later success. This can be a winning combination, as it shows a certain amount of humility, which can be in short supply amongst students.

The writer also uses humor, but does not let the essay get overpowered by quips and jokey asides. Humor can be a wonderful way to liven up a piece of writing, but allow it to work in the service of the piece rather than the other way around. In addition, never be afraid to cut a joke that just isn't working. It's better to have no humor at all than forced attempts at it.

Good writing is all about using concrete examples. In this case, the writer is able to point to a specific incident that shows the prompt in action. This specific failed test gives the writer a sense of immediacy and allows them to explore the idea. In this way, the reader gets the sense that this is truly wisdom gained.

That last point is vital. To truly answer a prompt like this, you have to be completely honest about your failure, whatever it might be. No matter what it was, chances are you learned something from it. There's nothing like a taste of failure to make sure you never experience it again.

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Your chance of acceptance, your chancing factors, extracurriculars, how to write a college essay about overcoming failure.

Hey guys, I'm working on my common app essay and want to write about a failure I've experienced. What are some tips for writing about failure in a way that's engaging and shows personal growth? I'm worried it might come off as negative or whiny.

Writing about overcoming failure can be a powerful and engaging topic for your college essay. The key is to focus on the lessons learned and how you've grown from the experience, rather than dwelling on the negative aspects of the failure itself. Here are some tips that can help you craft a compelling essay:

1. Start with a hook: Begin your essay with an attention-grabbing anecdote, quote or description that relates to your failure. This will engage the reader from the outset and provide context for the story that follows.

2. Be specific about the failure: Clearly explain what the failure was and provide enough details so that the reader can understand the situation. Avoid being vague or glossing over the failure itself as this can make it harder for the reader to connect with your story.

3. Show self-awareness: Acknowledge the role you played in the failure and any mistakes that you made. Demonstrating self-awareness and taking responsibility for your actions will show the admissions committee that you're mature, introspective, and able to learn from your mistakes.

4. Focus on growth: The most important part of your essay is not the failure itself, but rather the personal growth that occurred as a result. Explain what you learned from the experience and how you've applied those lessons to other aspects of your life. Provide specific examples of how you've changed or matured since the failure occurred.

5. Stay positive: Showcasing resilience and a positive attitude in the face of adversity can be very appealing to college admissions committees. Emphasize the silver linings, the valuable lessons learned, and any positive outcomes that resulted from the failure, rather than dwelling on the negative aspects.

6. End on a strong note: Conclude your essay by summarizing the key lessons learned and describing how the experience has shaped you as a person. This will help bring your essay full circle and leave the reader with a clear understanding of how you've grown from the failure.

Remember that everyone experiences failure in some form, and by sharing your story of overcoming it, you can help paint a more genuine and relatable picture of yourself to the college admissions committee. Good luck with your essay!

About CollegeVine’s Expert FAQ

CollegeVine’s Q&A seeks to offer informed perspectives on commonly asked admissions questions. Every answer is refined and validated by our team of admissions experts to ensure it resonates with trusted knowledge in the field.

Striking Out: Sample Common Application Essay

Richard's Essay on His Losing Baseball Game and a Full Critique

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The following sample essay responds to the 2019-20 Common Application Prompt #2: "The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?" Read a critique of this essay to learn strategies and tips for writing your own .

Richard's Common Application Essay on Failure

Striking Out

I've played baseball ever since I could remember, but somehow, at fourteen, I still wasn't very good at it. You'd think that ten years of summer leagues and two older brothers who'd been the stars of their teams would have rubbed off on me, but you'd be wrong. I mean, I wasn't completely hopeless. I was pretty fast, and I could hit my oldest brother's fastball maybe three or four times out of ten, but I wasn't about to be scouted for college teams.

My team that summer, the Bengals, wasn't anything special, either. We had one or two pretty talented guys, but most, like me, were just barely what you could call decent. But somehow we'd almost scraped through the first round of playoffs, with only one game standing between us and semifinals. Predictably, the game had come down to the last inning, the Bengals had two outs and players on second and third base, and it was my turn at bat. It was like one of those moments you see in movies. The scrawny kid who no one really believed in hits a miraculous home run, winning the big game for his underdog team and becoming a local legend. Except my life wasn't The Sandlot , and any hopes my teammates or coach might've had for a last-minute rally to victory were crushed with my third swing-and-miss when the umpire sent me back to the dugout with a "strike three - you're out!"

I was inconsolably angry with myself. I spent the entire car ride home tuning out my parents' words of consolation, replaying my strike-out over and over in my head. For the next few days I was miserable thinking about how, if it hadn't been for me, the Bengals might have been on their way to a league victory, and nothing anyone said could convince me that the loss wasn't on my shoulders.

About a week later, some of my friends from the team got together at the park to hang out. When I arrived, I was a little surprised that no one seemed to be mad at me - after all, I'd lost us the game, and they had to be disappointed about not making it to the semifinals. It wasn't until we split into teams for an impromptu pickup game that I started to realize why no one was upset. Maybe it was the excitement of reaching the playoffs or the pressure of living up to my brothers' examples, but sometime during that game, I'd lost sight of why most of us played summer league baseball. It wasn't to win the championship, as cool as that would have been. It was because we all loved to play. I didn't need a trophy or a Hollywood come-from-behind win to have fun playing baseball with my friends, but maybe I needed to strike out to remember that.

A Critique of Richard's Essay

A lot can be learned from Richard's writing by looking at all of its pieces. By thinking objectively about another person's essay, you will be better off when it comes time to write your own because you will understand what admissions officers are looking for.

"Striking Out" isn't an overly clever title, but it gets the job done. It tells you that you are about to read an essay about failure and baseball. A good title  summarizes an essay and intrigues its readers but focus more on an appropriate title than on an interesting one.

Language and Tone

Richard leans into informal language such as "I mean" and "you'd think" to make his essay conversational and friendly. He introduces himself as an unimpressive athlete who doesn't quite measure up to his brothers, this humility making him more relatable to his readers. While this level of informality is not preferred by all colleges, most are looking to learn as much about your personality as possible. Richard's easy tone accomplishes this.

The language of the essay is also tight and engaging. Each sentence gets a point across and Richard is economical with his use of words to clearly convey the setting and situation. College admissions officers are likely to appreciate the overall clarity and meticulousness of Richard's essay.

Richard establishes and maintains a self-deprecating and humble voice throughout his writing His willingness to be honest about his shortcomings shows that he is sure of himself and also tells colleges that he has a healthy self-concept and isn't afraid of failing. By not boasting about athletic prowess, Richard demonstrates a valuable quality of self-assuredness that colleges admire.

College admissions officers read many essays about sports, especially from applicants that are more interested in playing sports at college than getting an education. In fact, one of the top 10 bad essay topics  is the hero essay in which an applicant brags about making a goal that won their team the championship. Self-congratulatory essays have the effect of distancing you from the authentic qualities of successful college students and are therefore never a good idea.

Richard's essay has nothing to do with heroism. He is not claiming to be a star or over-inflating his abilities and his honesty is refreshing. His essay perfectly satisfies every aspect of the prompt by presenting a clear moment of failure and a significant lesson learned without blowing his accomplishments out of proportion. He managed to take the cliché topic of sports and turn it on its head, which admissions officers are much more likely to respect.

Richard's essay would be appropriate in most but not all situations. If he were hoping to play a sport competitively for a college, this would be the wrong essay. It would not impress NCAA scouts or make him likely to be recruited. This essay would be best for universities more interested in his personality than his baseball skills. Any college looking for mature, self-aware applicants with affable personalities would be drawn to Richard's story of failure.

A Final Word

Always keep in mind that the purpose of the Common Application essay is for colleges to learn who you are. While grades  and test scores will be considered, admissions offices will also be using more subjective and  holistic  information about what you are like as a person. Richard succeeds in making a good impression by being a strong and engaging writer with a positive sense of self. Most would agree that he seems like the type of student who would be a useful addition to the campus community.

While the essay is successful, keep in mind that your own essay needs to have nothing in common with this sample and you should not use it as a model. There are innumerable ways to approach the idea of a challenge, setback, or failure and your essay needs to be true to your own experiences and personality.

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Why learning from failure is your key to success

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What is failure?

What do you learn from failure, why is it important to learn from failure, how does failure lead to learning.

5 tips for learning from failure

10 quotes about learning from failure

I’ve failed at quite a few things in my life. 

As a kid, I tried guitar, the cello, and piano — all with mediocre (at best) results. I quickly dumped instruments for sports. But I learned that even despite my height, I wasn’t very good at basketball. Or soccer. Or tennis. (I was atrociously bad at tennis, to be fair.) 

As an adult, failures continued. I didn’t get that “ dream job ” I wanted. I was rejected from a graduate school program I really wanted to attend. I’ve pitched a chapbook to dozens of publishers with dozens matched in rejection letters. I had an idea for a new way of doing things at work — and it didn’t work out. Even some relationships and friendships failed . 

But along the way, I learned. I learned from my mistakes . I learned what my strengths were. I learned where I wanted to take my career. I learned that failures don’t define me. I learned that in order to succeed, I needed to fail. And I learned that it’s possible to get better at something — even after you’ve failed. 

When you experience a failure, you can feel it in your gut. You may think to yourself, “I’m never coming back from this.” Your confidence and self-esteem can take a hit. You might not want to try something new again. 

It took Thomas Edison 10,000 attempts to perfect the light bulb . Arianna Huffington was rejected by 36 publishers . Bill Gates’ first company was a complete disaster .

Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper job for lack of creativity. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team . Oprah Winfrey was fired from her first job , where she experienced sexual harassment in a hostile work environment . 

The most successful people in the world have failed, often. How are you learning from failure? What lessons can failure teach you? Where can you find gratitude in failure? 

We’ve all experienced failure. And honestly, our definition of failure might vary depending on our experiences. So, what is failure ? 

But at its core, failure is defined as a lack of success. Failure is defined as the inability to meet an expectation. Here are some examples of failure: 

• A high school student needs to get an A on a math test to get a B in the class. They study and work with the teacher one-on-one. But when the test results come back, they received a B. This means they will get a C+ in the class. 
• A job seeker recently learned new skills through a workforce development program . They’ve graduated from the program but can’t seem to find a job. They’ve applied to almost 50 jobs with no interviews. 
• An employee recently got promoted to become a people manager . However, in annual performance reviews , they learn their team is really struggling. The team isn’t delivering on its goals. On top of it, the manager is receiving upward feedback that they need to work on their people management skills. 

"We learn more from our failures than from our successes. Not only do we find out what doesn’t work so that we can adjust our future attempts, we learn about ourselves in the process and gain a bit of empathy towards others that might be struggling as well."  Kealy Spring, Leadership Fellow Coach, BetterUp  

People have studied failure. There’s growing research and science around what it means to fail. In fact, failure has been a proven prerequisite for success . But here’s the catch: failure only works to your advantage if you learn from your failures. 

Failure hurts. It doesn’t make us feel good. It can put our perfectionism to the test. It can be difficult to pick ourselves up to try again. 

So, what do you learn from failure? Short answer: a lot more than you think. 

From failure, we learn resiliency. It’s hard to not learn how to build resilience after a failure, especially if you’re determined to overcome failure. 

Resilience is an important life skill to build. And when you build (and learn) resilience, it helps you in other ways, too. Resilience can help you build a growth mindset . It can help you adopt the right behaviors to overcome change . And it can help you build grit, tenacity, and motivation. 

Humility 

Our egos are sensitive. They can grow and evolve into beasts of their own. And most of the time, a healthy dose of failure is good for our ego. It keeps us humble. Failure can teach us how to embody important characteristics, like humility in leadership . 

Flexibility 

Even the best-laid plans are disrupted. And that goes for failures, too. You might’ve set a goal that you’ve realized you’ve overestimated the scope. You’ve learned from your first failure that you need to adjust your goal. Or maybe, you can still achieve your goal. You just need to adjust your approach. 

That’s where flexibility comes in. I often think of the phrase: You can’t do the same thing over and over and expect different results. Failures teach us flexibility, adaptability, and how to overcome obstacles. It teaches us to use change to our advantage. It keeps us nimble and helps us adopt that growth mindset. 

Innovation and creativity 

Much like flexibility, innovation and creativity can present themselves as lessons of failure. 

I studied creative writing. One of my favorite professors used to congratulate us for completing a crappy first draft. He’d say, “Be okay with the crappy first draft. It’ll get better and better your third, fourth, fifth draft.”  

Edison didn’t land the lightbulb on the first, second, or even thousandth try. It took 10,000 tries to perfect the lightbulb. Innovation and creativity take time, iterations, and failures along the way. Practice some patience and Inner Work® to keep the creative juices flowing, even amid failure. 

Motivation 

I’m one of those people who when someone tells me I can’t do something, it makes me that much more determined to prove them wrong. 

Motivation is a valuable and important lesson from failure. Oftentimes, our failures are motivators. For example, let’s say you’re practicing your presentation skills . You’ve done multiple presentations and public speaking opportunities. And you make mistakes along the way. But by your tenth presentation, you finally nail it flawlessly. 

Seeing progress along the way is a big motivator. Failure can help fuel our motivation and help us reach our goals. 

We’re human beings. That means we enter this world with a lot of opportunities for growth and personal development . Together, we’re on this collective journey to better ourselves (and the world around us). But in order to do so, we need to fail. 

It’s important to learn from failure because it brings us one step closer to reaching success. It’s been cited that one in four entrepreneurs fail at their business before succeeding. 

Duke University professor Sim Sitkin dubbed the term “intelligent failures.” Intelligent failures are good for us because it brings us knowledge, value, and insight. What’s important to remember is that we need to pause and reflect. We need to pay close attention to our failures to be able to learn from them. 

There are plenty of learning opportunities hidden in our failures . But how does failure lead to learning? Here are three ways failure leads to learning. 

Failure puts us back to square one

By definition, failure means that we didn’t achieve success. It forces us back to square one, more often than not. 

But after failing, we know that we can’t approach the same task or goal in the same way. We wouldn’t achieve the same result. So, the act of failure inevitably leads to thinking of new ways to overcome obstacles . 

Failure forces us to examine what went wrong 

Reflection is an important part of failure. Without reflection, we wouldn’t learn. It’s important that after we fail, we take a moment to sit with it. 

What about the failure went well? What didn’t go well? Where can we pinpoint what went wrong? It helps us to figure out how to course correct and do it better the next time. 

Failure allows us to innovate 

As the phrase goes, we can’t keep doing the same thing and expect the same results. Innovation is critical to learning. But in order to innovate, we need to know what went wrong. 

Failure leads to learning because we’re able to identify where we went off track. From there, we can implement new ideas, new approaches, and new strategies. All of this results in increased innovation and creativity, which aids us in our learning journey . 

5 tips for learning from failure 

We’ve all failed. But we can learn to fail gracefully to help expedite the learning process . Here are five tips for learning from failure. 

• Don’t give up 
• Adopt a growth mindset 
• Practice Inner Work®
• Be courageous 
• Build mental fitness 

1. Don’t give up 

We’ve all been there. A failure particularly stings and we want to just throw in the towel. 

Here’s your sign that you shouldn’t. Be persistent in pursuit of your dreams. It might take some reframing of perspectives. For example, can you break your big goal into little wins? 

I have a lifelong goal of publishing a book. I’ve tried writing various novels over the years. But the idea of writing a full book sounds so daunting and intimidating. I’ve abandoned my ideas over and over again. 

But now, I’m in a couple of creative writing classes. I’m setting smaller goals for myself. Instead of having a full book as my goal, I’m trying to focus on writing 2,000 words a week. It keeps me motivated and prevents me from giving up. 

"If you recently failed at something, give yourself a moment to process it, feel the emotions whatever they may be, and then work to reframe the perceived failure as an opportunity for growth. Ask yourself, 'what did I learn from that?' It is ultimately about cultivating a growth mindset and celebrating the effort rather than the result." Kealy Spring, Leadership Fellow Coach, BetterUp 

2. Adopt a growth mindset 

You have to want to learn to actually learn from failure. To do this well, you need to adopt a growth mindset. A growth mindset embraces challenges. It perseveres even in failures. People can learn, change, and adapt. It wants to learn and grow. It accepts and embraces constructive feedback and constructive criticism . 

And it’s not easy. But a fixed mindset doesn’t set up anyone for success. Think of ways you can change your perspective around your day-to-day interactions as a start. 

3. Practice Inner Work®  

The science behind Inner Work® shows incredible mental fitness benefits . Inner Work® looks different for everyone. For example, a 30-minute walk in the morning can be your daily Inner Work® . Or a week away from work while you take advantage of your unlimited PTO . Or just a three-minute journaling session or mindful moment . 

Whatever your Inner Work® looks like, practice it. Embed Inner Work® into your daily habits. You’ll find better clarity, more productivity, increased creativity and innovation, and more.   

4. Be courageous 

During the most recent winter Olympics, a video of a four-year-old going snowboarding went viral . The father of the little girl hooked her up to a microphone to record her positive self-talk while she cruises down the mountain. In the video, you can hear her say, “I won’t fall. Maybe I will. That’s OK ‘cause we all fall.” 

To fail takes courage . But to try again after failure takes even more. It’s OK if you fail (and then fail again). But have the courage to get up and try and try again. 

5. Build mental fitness

Hand-in-hand with a growth mindset comes mental fitness. Look at failure as a learning journey. What skills can you pick up along the way? What tools can you add to your toolbox? What new things can you take away from your failures? 

Start building your mental fitness plan with failures as part of your journey. With increased mental fitness , you’ll find yourself better equipped to weather the ups and downs of life. BetterUp can help you on your mental fitness journey. 

Wise words have been said about failure. We’ve compiled ten of our favorite quotes about learning from failure . Here are some words of wisdom to add to your desk or fridge. 

• “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” ― Winston S. Churchill
• “Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.” ― Salvador Dali
• “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.” ― Maya Angelou
• “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.” ― Theodore Roosevelt
• “Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.” ― Junot Díaz 
• “I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.” ― Amelia Earhart
• “Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so 'safe,' and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.” ― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
• “You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it. You don't let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.” ― Johnny Cash
•  "It's only when you risk failure that you discover things. When you play it safe, you're not expressing the utmost of your human experience." ― Lupita Nyong'o
• “It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” ― Bill Gates

What do you notice about all of these quotes? What reframing can you bring to your perspective? 

Learn to embrace your failures 

Everyone experiences failure. And oftentimes, it’s the fear of failure that stands in the way of our success. Failure has inherently come with the idea that it’s a bad thing. But in reality, the best failures are the best learners. From business leaders to celebrities, successful people are built on failure. 

With the right mindset and permission to fail, you can learn valuable lessons. Our past failures are a part of the learning experience . And sometimes, it’s the major failures that teach us the most. 

How can you shift your thought process around failure? Can you tackle your fear of failure head-on? Reaching our full human potential means that we’re inevitably bound to fail. But instead of wallowing, try courage. Instead of pity, try grit. Instead of defeat, try persistence. 

Learning to fail can help build your mental fitness, one step at a time. And with strong mental fitness , you can unlock your full potential and achieve your dreams. BetterUp can help. Get started with a coach today. 

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Madeline Miles

Madeline is a writer, communicator, and storyteller who is passionate about using words to help drive positive change. She holds a bachelor's in English Creative Writing and Communication Studies and lives in Denver, Colorado. In her spare time, she's usually somewhere outside (preferably in the mountains) — and enjoys poetry and fiction.

What is failure and how can we make the most of it?

Why do we fear failure understanding setbacks to conquer wins, 7 ways to overcome fear of failure and move forward in life, how self-compassion strengthens resilience, understanding why you feel like a failure (& why you're not), dealing with work anxiety how, when, and if you should tell your boss, how to negotiate: 7 tips for effective negotiation, a new role for chros: insights from the gartner reimaginehr conference, how to give negative feedback to a manager, with examples, similar articles, 13 tips to develop a growth mindset, learning the art of making mistakes, how to get out of your comfort zone (in 6 simple steps), 4 ways to overcome your quarter-life crisis (and redefining success), sara blakely on how mindset shapes, lifts, and empowers, why asynchronous learning is the key to successful upskilling, stay connected with betterup, get our newsletter, event invites, plus product insights and research..

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How to Write the “Overcoming Challenges” Essay + Examples

What’s covered:.

• What is the Overcoming Challenges Essay?
• Real Overcoming Challenges Essay Prompts
• How to Choose a Topic
• Writing Tips

Overcoming Challenges Essay Examples

• Where to Get Your Essay Edited

While any college essay can be intimidating, the Overcoming Challenges prompt often worries students the most. Those students who’ve been lucky enough not to experience trauma tend to assume they have nothing worth saying. On the other hand, students who’ve overcome larger obstacles may be hesitant to talk about them.

Regardless of your particular circumstances, there are steps you can take to make the essay writing process simpler. Here are our top tips for writing the overcoming challenges essay successfully.

What is the “Overcoming Challenges” Essay?

The overcoming challenges prompt shows up frequently in both main application essays (like the Common App) and supplemental essays. Because supplemental essays allow students to provide schools with additional information, applicants should be sure that the subject matter they choose to write about differs from what’s in their main essay.

Students often assume the overcoming challenges essay requires them to detail past traumas. While you can certainly write about an experience that’s had a profound effect on your life, it’s important to remember that colleges aren’t evaluating students based on the seriousness of the obstacle they overcame.

On the contrary, the goal of this essay is to show admissions officers that you have the intelligence and fortitude to handle any challenges that come your way. After all, college serves as an introduction to adult life, and schools want to know that the students they admit are up to the task. 

Real “Overcoming Challenges” Essay Prompts

To help you understand what the “Overcoming Challenges” essay looks like, here are a couple sample prompts.

Currently, the Common Application asks students to answer the following prompt in 650 words or less:

“The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?”

For the past several years, MIT has prompted students to write 200 to 250 words on the following:

“Tell us about the most significant challenge you’ve faced or something important that didn’t go according to plan. How did you manage the situation?”

In both cases, the prompts explicitly ask for your response to the challenge. The event itself isn’t as important as how it pushed you to grow.

How to Choose a Topic for an Essay on Overcoming Challenges

When it comes to finding the best topic for your overcoming challenges essays, there’s no right answer. The word “challenge” is ambiguous and could be used to reference a wide range of situations from prevailing over a bully to getting over your lifelong stage fright to appear in a school musical. Here are some suggestions to keep in mind when selecting an essay subject.

1. Avoid trivial or common topics

While there aren’t many hard-and-fast rules for choosing an essay topic, students should avoid overdone topics.

These include:

• Working hard in a challenging class
• Overcoming a sports injury
• Moving schools or immigrating to the US
• Tragedy (divorce, death, abuse)

Admissions officers have read numerous essays on the subject, so it’s harder for you to stand out (see our full list of cliché college essay topics to avoid ). If events like these were truly formative to you, you can still choose to write about them, but you’ll need to be as personal as possible. 

It’s also ideal if you have a less traditional storyline for a cliché topic; for example, if your sports injury led you to discover a new passion, that would be a more unique story than detailing how you overcame your injury and got back in the game.

Similarly, students may not want to write about an obstacle that admissions committees could perceive as low stakes, such as getting a B on a test, or getting into a small fight with a friend. The goal of this essay is to illustrate how you respond to adversity, so the topic you pick should’ve been at least impactful on your personal growth.

2. Pick challenges that demonstrate qualities you want to highlight

Students often mistakenly assume they need to have experienced exceptional circumstances like poverty, an abusive parent, or cancer to write a good essay. The truth is that the best topics will allow you to highlight specific personal qualities and share more about who you are. The essay should be less about the challenge itself, and more about how you responded to it.

Ask yourself what personality traits you want to emphasize, and see what’s missing in your application. Maybe you want to highlight your adaptability, for example, but that isn’t clearly expressed in your application. In this case, you might write about a challenge that put your adaptability to the test, or shaped you to become more adaptable.

Here are some examples of good topics we’ve seen over the years:

• Not having a coach for a sports team and becoming one yourself
• Helping a parent through a serious health issue
• Trying to get the school track dedicated to a coach
• Having to switch your Model UN position last-minute

Tips for Writing an Essay About Overcoming Challenges

Once you’ve selected a topic for your essays, it’s time to sit down and write. For best results, make sure your essay focuses on your efforts to tackle an obstacle rather than the problem itself. Additionally, you could avoid essay writing pitfalls by doing the following:

1. Choose an original essay structure

If you want your overcoming challenges essay to attract attention, aim to break away from more traditional structures. Most of these essays start by describing an unsuccessful attempt at a goal and then explain the steps the writer took to master the challenge. 

You can stand out by choosing a challenge you’re still working on overcoming, or focus on a mental or emotional challenge that spans multiple activities or events. For example, you might discuss your fear of public speaking and how that impacted your ability to coach your brother’s Little League team and run for Student Council. 

You can also choose a challenge that can be narrated in the moment, such as being put on the spot to teach a yoga class. These challenges can make particularly engaging essays, as you get to experience the writer’s thoughts and emotions as they unfold.

Keep in mind that you don’t necessarily need to have succeeded in your goal for this essay. Maybe you ran for an election and lost, or maybe you proposed a measure to the school board that wasn’t passed. It’s still possible to write a strong essay about topics like these as long as you focus on your personal growth. In fact, these may make for even stronger essays since they are more unconventional topics.

2. Focus on the internal

When writing about past experiences, you may be tempted to spend too much time describing specific people and events. With an Overcoming Challenges essay though, the goal is to focus on your thoughts and feelings.

For example, rather than detail all the steps you took to become a better public speaker, use the majority of your essay to describe your mental state as you embarked on the journey to achieving your goals. Were you excited, scared, anxious, or hopeful? Don’t be afraid to let the reader in on your innermost emotions and thoughts during this process.

3. Share what you learned 

An Overcoming Challenges essay should leave the reader with a clear understanding of what you learned on your journey, be it physical, mental, or emotional. There’s no need to explicitly say “this experience taught me X,” but your essay should at least implicitly share any lessons you learned. This can be done through your actions and in-the-moment reflections. Remember that the goal is to show admissions committees why your experiences make you a great candidate for admission. 

Was I no longer the beloved daughter of nature, whisperer of trees? Knee-high rubber boots, camouflage, bug spray—I wore the g arb and perfume of a proud wild woman, yet there I was, hunched over the pathetic pile of stubborn sticks, utterly stumped, on the verge of tears. As a child, I had considered myself a kind of rustic princess, a cradler of spiders and centipedes, who was serenaded by mourning doves and chickadees, who could glide through tick-infested meadows and emerge Lyme-free. I knew the cracks of the earth like the scars on my own rough palms. Yet here I was, ten years later, incapable of performing the most fundamental outdoor task: I could not, for the life of me, start a fire. 

Furiously I rubbed the twigs together—rubbed and rubbed until shreds of skin flaked from my fingers. No smoke. The twigs were too young, too sticky-green; I tossed them away with a shower of curses, and began tearing through the underbrush in search of a more flammable collection. My efforts were fruitless. Livid, I bit a rejected twig, determined to prove that the forest had spurned me, offering only young, wet bones that would never burn. But the wood cracked like carrots between my teeth—old, brittle, and bitter. Roaring and nursing my aching palms, I retreated to the tent, where I sulked and awaited the jeers of my family. 

Rattling their empty worm cans and reeking of fat fish, my brother and cousins swaggered into the campsite. Immediately, they noticed the minor stick massacre by the fire pit and called to me, their deep voices already sharp with contempt. 

“Where’s the fire, Princess Clara?” they taunted. “Having some trouble?” They prodded me with the ends of the chewed branches and, with a few effortless scrapes of wood on rock, sparked a red and roaring flame. My face burned long after I left the fire pit. The camp stank of salmon and shame. 

In the tent, I pondered my failure. Was I so dainty? Was I that incapable? I thought of my hands, how calloused and capable they had been, how tender and smooth they had become. It had been years since I’d kneaded mud between my fingers; instead of scaling a white pine, I’d practiced scales on my piano, my hands softening into those of a musician—fleshy and sensitive. And I’d gotten glasses, having grown horrifically nearsighted; long nights of dim lighting and thick books had done this. I couldn’t remember the last time I had lain down on a hill, barefaced, and seen the stars without having to squint. Crawling along the edge of the tent, a spider confirmed my transformation—he disgusted me, and I felt an overwhelming urge to squash him. 

Yet, I realized I hadn’t really changed—I had only shifted perspective. I still eagerly explored new worlds, but through poems and prose rather than pastures and puddles. I’d grown to prefer the boom of a bass over that of a bullfrog, learned to coax a different kind of fire from wood, having developed a burn for writing rhymes and scrawling hypotheses. 

That night, I stayed up late with my journal and wrote about the spider I had decided not to kill. I had tolerated him just barely, only shrieking when he jumped—it helped to watch him decorate the corners of the tent with his delicate webs, knowing that he couldn’t start fires, either. When the night grew cold and the embers died, my words still smoked—my hands burned from all that scrawling—and even when I fell asleep, the ideas kept sparking—I was on fire, always on fire.

This essay is an excellent example because the writer turns an everyday challenge—starting a fire—into an exploration of her identity. The writer was once “a kind of rustic princess, a cradler of spiders and centipedes,” but has since traded her love of the outdoors for a love of music, writing, and reading. 

The story begins in media res , or in the middle of the action, allowing readers to feel as if we’re there with the writer. One of the essay’s biggest strengths is its use of imagery. We can easily visualize the writer’s childhood and the present day. For instance, she states that she “rubbed and rubbed [the twigs] until shreds of skin flaked from my fingers.”

The writing has an extremely literary quality, particularly with its wordplay. The writer reappropriates words and meanings, and even appeals to the senses: “My face burned long after I left the fire pit. The camp stank of salmon and shame.” She later uses a parallelism to cleverly juxtapose her changed interests: “instead of scaling a white pine, I’d practiced scales on my piano.”

One of the essay’s main areas of improvement is its overemphasis on the “story” and lack of emphasis on the reflection. The second to last paragraph about changing perspective is crucial to the essay, as it ties the anecdote to larger lessons in the writer’s life. She states that she hasn’t changed, but has only shifted perspective. Yet, we don’t get a good sense of where this realization comes from and how it impacts her life going forward. 

The end of the essay offers a satisfying return to the fire imagery, and highlights the writer’s passion—the one thing that has remained constant in her life.

“Getting beat is one thing – it’s part of competing – but I want no part in losing.” Coach Rob Stark’s motto never fails to remind me of his encouragement on early-morning bus rides to track meets around the state. I’ve always appreciated the phrase, but an experience last June helped me understand its more profound, universal meaning.

Stark, as we affectionately call him, has coached track at my high school for 25 years. His care, dedication, and emphasis on developing good character has left an enduring impact on me and hundreds of other students. Not only did he help me discover my talent and love for running, but he also taught me the importance of commitment and discipline and to approach every endeavor with the passion and intensity that I bring to running. When I learned a neighboring high school had dedicated their track to a longtime coach, I felt that Stark deserved similar honors.

Our school district’s board of education indicated they would only dedicate our track to Stark if I could demonstrate that he was extraordinary. I took charge and mobilized my teammates to distribute petitions, reach out to alumni, and compile statistics on the many team and individual champions Stark had coached over the years. We received astounding support, collecting almost 3,000 signatures and pages of endorsements from across the community. With help from my teammates, I presented this evidence to the board.

They didn’t bite. 

Most members argued that dedicating the track was a low priority. Knowing that we had to act quickly to convince them of its importance, I called a team meeting where we drafted a rebuttal for the next board meeting. To my surprise, they chose me to deliver it. I was far from the best public speaker in the group, and I felt nervous about going before the unsympathetic board again. However, at that second meeting, I discovered that I enjoy articulating and arguing for something that I’m passionate about.

Public speaking resembles a cross country race. Walking to the starting line, you have to trust your training and quell your last minute doubts. When the gun fires, you can’t think too hard about anything; your performance has to be instinctual, natural, even relaxed. At the next board meeting, the podium was my starting line. As I walked up to it, familiar butterflies fluttered in my stomach. Instead of the track stretching out in front of me, I faced the vast audience of teachers, board members, and my teammates. I felt my adrenaline build, and reassured myself: I’ve put in the work, my argument is powerful and sound. As the board president told me to introduce myself, I heard, “runners set” in the back of my mind. She finished speaking, and Bang! The brief silence was the gunshot for me to begin. 

The next few minutes blurred together, but when the dust settled, I knew from the board members’ expressions and the audience’s thunderous approval that I had run quite a race. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough; the board voted down our proposal. I was disappointed, but proud of myself, my team, and our collaboration off the track. We stood up for a cause we believed in, and I overcame my worries about being a leader. Although I discovered that changing the status quo through an elected body can be a painstakingly difficult process and requires perseverance, I learned that I enjoy the challenges this effort offers. Last month, one of the school board members joked that I had become a “regular” – I now often show up to meetings to advocate for a variety of causes, including better environmental practices in cafeterias and safer equipment for athletes.

Just as Stark taught me, I worked passionately to achieve my goal. I may have been beaten when I appealed to the board, but I certainly didn’t lose, and that would have made Stark proud.

While the writer didn’t succeed in getting the track dedicated to Coach Stark, their essay is certainly successful in showing their willingness to push themselves and take initiative.

The essay opens with a quote from Coach Stark that later comes full circle at the end of the essay. We learn about Stark’s impact and the motivation for trying to get the track dedicated to him.

One of the biggest areas of improvement in the intro, however, is how the essay tells us Stark’s impact rather than showing us: His care, dedication, and emphasis on developing good character has left an enduring impact on me and hundreds of other students. Not only did he help me discover my talent and love for running, but he also taught me the importance of commitment and discipline and to approach every endeavor with the passion and intensity that I bring to running.

The writer could’ve helped us feel a stronger emotional connection to Stark if they had included examples of Stark’s qualities, rather than explicitly stating them. For example, they could’ve written something like: Stark was the kind of person who would give you gas money if you told him your parents couldn’t afford to pick you up from practice. And he actually did that—several times. At track meets, alumni regularly would come talk to him and tell him how he’d changed their lives. Before Stark, I was ambivalent about running and was on the JV team, but his encouragement motivated me to run longer and harder and eventually make varsity. Because of him, I approach every endeavor with the passion and intensity that I bring to running.

The essay goes on to explain how the writer overcame their apprehension of public speaking, and likens the process of submitting an appeal to the school board to running a race. This metaphor makes the writing more engaging and allows us to feel the student’s emotions.

While the student didn’t ultimately succeed in getting the track dedicated, we learn about their resilience and initiative: I now often show up to meetings to advocate for a variety of causes, including better environmental practices in cafeterias and safer equipment for athletes.

Overall, this essay is well-done. It demonstrates growth despite failing to meet a goal, which is a unique essay structure. The running metaphor and full-circle intro/ending also elevate the writing in this essay.

Where to Get Your Overcoming Challenges Essay Edited

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Why Failure Is Good for Success

The sweetest victory is the one that’s most difficult. The one that requires you to reach down deep inside, to fight with everything you’ve got, to be willing to leave everything out there on the battlefield—without knowing, until that do-or-die moment, if your heroic effort will be enough. Society doesn’t reward defeat, and you won’t find many failures documented in history books.

The exceptions are those failures that become stepping stones to later success . Such is the case with Thomas Edison, whose most memorable invention was the light bulb, which purportedly took him 1,000 tries before he developed a successful prototype. “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?” a reporter asked. “I didn’t fail 1,000 times,” Edison responded. “The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”

Unlike Edison, many of us avoid the prospect of failure . In fact, we’re so focused on not failing that we don’t aim for success, settling instead for a life of mediocrity. When we do make missteps, we gloss over them, selectively editing out the miscalculations or mistakes in our life’s résumé. “Failure is not an option,” NASA flight controller Jerry C. Bostick reportedly stated during the mission to bring the damaged Apollo 13 back to Earth, and that phrase has been etched into the collective memory ever since. To many in our success-driven society, failure isn’t just considered a non-option—it’s deemed a deficiency, says Kathryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error . “Of all the things we are wrong about, this idea of error might well top the list,” Schulz says. “It is our meta-mistake: We are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition.”

Related: 10 Things Successful People Never Do Again

Failure Is Life’s Greatest Teacher

When we take a closer look at the great thinkers throughout history, a willingness to take on failure isn’t a new or extraordinary thought at all. From the likes of Augustine, Darwin and Freud to the business mavericks and sports legends of today, failure is as powerful a tool as any in reaching great success. “Failure and defeat are life’s greatest teachers [but] sadly, most people, and particularly conservative corporate cultures, don’t want to go there,” says Ralph Heath, managing partner of Synergy Leadership Group and author of Celebrating Failure: The Power of Taking Risks, Making Mistakes and Thinking Big . “Instead they choose to play it safe, to fly below the radar, repeating the same safe choices over and over again. They operate under the belief that if they make no waves, they attract no attention; no one will yell at them for failing because they generally never attempt anything great at which they could possibly fail (or succeed).”

However, in today’s post-recession economy, some employers are no longer shying away from failure—they’re embracing it. According to a recent article in BusinessWeek, many companies are deliberately seeking out those with track records reflecting both failure and success, believing that those who have been in the trenches, survived battle and come out on the other side have irreplaceable experience and perseverance.

“The quickest road to success is to possess an attitude toward failure of ‘no fear.’ ”

They’re veterans of failure. The prevailing school of thought in progressive companies—such as Intuit, General Electric, Corning and Virgin Atlantic—is that great success depends on great risk , and failure is simply a common byproduct. Executives of such organizations don’t mourn their mistakes but instead parlay them into future gains. “The quickest road to success is to possess an attitude toward failure of ‘no fear,’ ” says Heath. “To do their work well, to be successful and to keep their companies competitive, leaders and workers on the front lines need to stick their necks out a mile every day.

They have to deliver risky, edgy, breakthrough ideas, plans, presentations, advice, technology, products, leadership, bills and more. And they have to deliver all this fearlessly—without any fear whatsoever of failure, rejection or punishment.”

Reaching Your Potential

The same holds true for personal quests, whether in overcoming some specific challenge or reaching your full potential in all aspects of life. To achieve your personal best, to reach unparalleled heights, to make the impossible possible, you can’t fear failure, you must think big, and you have to push yourself . When we think of people with this mindset, we imagine the daredevils, the pioneers, the inventors, the explorers: They embrace failure as a necessary step to unprecedented success . But you don’t have to walk a tightrope, climb Mount Everest or cure polio to employ this mindset in your own life.

When the rewards of success are great, embracing possible failure is key to taking on a variety of challenges, whether you’re reinventing yourself by starting a new business or allowing yourself to trust another person to build a deeper relationship. “To achieve any worthy goal, you must take risks,” says writer and speaker John C. Maxwell. In his book Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes into Stepping Stones for Success , he points to the example of legendary aviator Amelia Earhart, who set several records and achieved many firsts in her lifetime, including being the first female pilot to fly solo over the Atlantic Ocean.

Although her final flight proved fateful, Maxwell believes she knew the risk—and that the potential reward was worth it. “[Earhart’s] advice when it came to risk was simple and direct: ‘Decide whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying.’ ” Of course, the risks you take should be calculated; you shouldn’t fly blindly into the night and simply hope for the best. Achieving the goal or at least waging a heroic effort requires preparation, practice and some awareness of your skills and talents.

Easing Into a Fearless Mindset

“ One of the biggest secrets to success is operating inside your strength zone but outside of your comfort zone,” Heath says. Although you might fail incredibly, you might succeed incredibly—and that’s why incredible risk and courage are requisite. Either way, you’ll learn more than ever about your strengths, talents and resolve, and you’ll strengthen your will for the next challenge. If this sounds like dangerous territory, it can be. But there are ways to ease into this fearless mindset.

Related: 21 Quotes About Failing Fearlessly

Maintain a Positive Attitude

The first is to consciously maintain a positive attitude so that, no matter what you encounter, you’ll be able to see the lessons of the experience and continue to push forward. “It’s true that not everyone is positive by nature,” says Maxwell, who cites his father as someone who would describe himself as a negative person by nature. “Here’s how my dad changed his attitude. First, he made a choice: He continually chooses to have a positive attitude.

Reading and Listening to Motivational Material

Second, he’s continually reading and listening to materials that bolster that attitude. For example, he’s read The Power of Positive Thinking many times. I didn’t get it at first, so once I asked him why. His response: ‘Son, I need to keep filling the tank so I can stay positive.’ ” Heath recommends studying the failures and subsequent reactions of successful people and, within a business context, repeating such histories for others. “Reward them and applaud their efforts in front of the entire organization so everyone understands it is OK to fail.

So employees say to themselves, ‘I see that Bill, the vice president of widgets, who the president adores, failed, and he is not only back at work, but he is driving a hot new sports car. I can fail and come to work the next day. Bill is proof of it.’ ” Finally, Heath stays motivated by the thought that, “if I become complacent and don’t take risks, someone will notice what I am doing and improve upon my efforts over time, and put me out of work. You’ve got to keep finding better ways to run your life , or someone will take what you’ve accomplished, improve upon it, and be very pleased with the results. Keep moving forward or die.”  

This article was originally published in September 2010 and has been updated. Photo by

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Failure and Success in Human Life Essay

Success if one of the major concerns of modern society, Nowadays, it serves as the main determiner of the significance of an individual and his/her position in society. For this reason, everyone tries to attain success and promote the further development of personality. However, there are numerous challenges a person might face while trying to improve his/her position in society. It is a complicated process that is comprised of numerous ups and downs. Besides, it is crucial to realize the fact that failure is an integral part of the life of a human being, and it helps to acquire the new experience and reconsider some approaches.

Revolving around the issue, one could remember his/her own failure. Sometimes it is rather painful and could result in disappointment and despair. Moreover, failure can make a person abandon some projects and accept his/her helplessness. As for me, I had a number of painful downs in my life, which impacted my personality and triggered a certain change process. However, at first, I was rather vulnerable, and any failure was a great tragedy. I was sure that it resulted from my inability to perform a certain kind of activity and evidenced the necessity of giving up. Yet, very soon, I realized that this approach could ruin my life and deprive me of any perspectives.

This recognition of this idea resulted in the reconsideration of my approach towards success and its main components. The fact is that failure is one of the major concerns related to the issue. However, it does not prove our weakness. It just serves as evidence that the chosen method or approach is not efficient enough to achieve the needed goal. In this regard, it is vital to analyze the main reasons that conditioned fiasco to acquire clear knowledge about the weaknesses of the plan and skill gaps. This investigation will promote a better understanding of the main vectors of the development of personality needed to become successful.

Revolving around my own experience, failures in various projects served as the positive reinforcement for me. I was not able to accept the idea that there were things not available to me. The absence of the result just evidenced the lack of preparation and the necessity of some additional effort. In this regard, the reconsideration of my personal attitude towards the issue promoted the significant improvement of my personality.

For instance, critical writing has always been one of my weak points, and I experienced a number of failures in the given sphere. Besides, realizing the necessity of writing skills and the impact they have on my further personal and professional development, I made efforts to improve this aspect. Analyzing my previous failures, I highlighted the weak points and created the plan to get rid of nagging mistakes. This fact evidences my own attitude towards failures and the necessity of their acceptance.

In conclusion, one should realize the fact that failure is not the sign of helplessness or the absence of any positive aspects. It just shows a person that he/she should work harder to attain success and contribute to his/her personal and professional development. In this regard, we should try to analyze them and determine the major concerns related to a certain issue or project as the lessons we take from failures are fundamental to later success.

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Essay on Failure Is The Stepping Stone To Success

Students are often asked to write an essay on Failure Is The Stepping Stone To Success in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Failure Is The Stepping Stone To Success

Introduction.

Failure is often seen as a bad thing. But, if we change our view, we can see it as a stepping stone to success. It’s a chance to learn and grow.

Learning from Mistakes

When we fail, we learn what doesn’t work. This helps us find what does work. We gain knowledge and experience from our mistakes.

Building Character

Failure also builds our character. It makes us strong and resilient. It shows us that we can face challenges and not give up.

Path to Success

So, failure is not the end. It’s the start of a journey to success. By learning and growing from our failures, we can reach our goals.

In conclusion, failure is a stepping stone to success. It’s an opportunity to learn, grow, and become stronger. So, don’t fear failure. Embrace it and keep moving forward.

250 Words Essay on Failure Is The Stepping Stone To Success

In life, everyone aims to be successful. But the road to success is not always smooth. We often face hurdles and sometimes, we fail. Yet, it is crucial to understand that failure is not the end. Instead, it is a stepping stone to success.

When we make mistakes, we learn what not to do. This is important because it helps us avoid the same mistakes in the future. For example, if a student fails in a test, he will study harder next time to pass. This is how failure acts as a stepping stone to success.

The Role of Persistence

Being persistent is key to overcoming failure. When we fail, we should not give up. Instead, we should try again with more determination. The story of Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb, is a great example. He failed thousands of times before he succeeded.

Turning Failure into Success

To turn failure into success, we need to have a positive mindset. We should view failure as an opportunity to learn and grow. By doing so, we can turn our failures into stepping stones towards success.

In conclusion, failure is not something to be feared. It is, in fact, a stepping stone to success. It teaches us valuable lessons, makes us persistent, and helps us grow. So, the next time you fail, remember that it’s not the end, but the beginning of a journey towards success.

500 Words Essay on Failure Is The Stepping Stone To Success

Life is full of ups and downs. It is not a smooth journey, but rather a path full of obstacles and challenges. One of the most important lessons we learn from life is that failure is not the end. In fact, it can be the stepping stone to success.

Understanding Failure

Failure is when we are unable to achieve our goals or meet our expectations. It is a part of life that everyone experiences at one point or another. It can be in school, at home, or in our daily activities. Failure can make us feel sad and disappointed. But we should not let these feelings stop us from trying again.

Learning from Failure

Each failure teaches us something. It shows us what doesn’t work and encourages us to find a different way to reach our goals. For example, imagine you are trying to ride a bicycle for the first time. You may fall down many times. But each fall teaches you something new. You learn how to balance, how to pedal, and how to steer. Eventually, you learn to ride the bicycle. In this case, each fall or failure was a stepping stone to your success.

Failure and Success

Failure and success are two sides of the same coin. To reach success, we must face and overcome our failures. Many famous people have faced big failures before they found success. Thomas Edison, a famous inventor, failed thousands of times before he invented the light bulb. He once said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” This shows that he saw each failure as a step closer to success.

Building Resilience

Facing failures can make us stronger. It builds our resilience, which is our ability to bounce back from difficult situations. When we fail, we have two choices. We can give up, or we can try again. By choosing to try again, we are building our resilience. We are showing that we are not afraid of failure. We are ready to learn from it and move forward.

In conclusion, failure is not something to be afraid of. It is a stepping stone to success. Each failure is a lesson that brings us closer to our goals. So, the next time you fail, do not be disheartened. Remember, it is just a stepping stone on your path to success. Embrace it, learn from it, and move forward with more determination. Success is waiting for you at the end of your journey.

This essay is a reminder that failure is not the end. It is just a part of the journey to success. So, don’t be afraid to fail. Embrace it, learn from it, and use it as a stepping stone to reach your goals.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Failure In School
• Essay on Failure In Life
• Essay on Failing A Test

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Essay on Failure (1416 Words)

February 20, 2018 by Study Mentor 2 Comments

When a two year old toddler begins to walk for the first time, his parents jump with joy to see their tiny tot’s first big achievement.

The parents disregard the fact that in the process of beginning to walk, the child may have to fall many a times but would gradually start walking on his own.

The focus here is not on the inability of the child to start walking steadily right from the beginning, which they know would never happen, instead they focus on the possibility of the child picking himself up and starting to walk again.

This is a simple instance of success and failure , wherein after repeated attempts of failure by the child to walk all by him, finally tries to do it out of sheer determination and succeeds in it.

The idea here is to explain the term failure in the most relevant manner.   

Failure can be explained in so many ways. Failure can be seen as not being able to achieve success in the tasks performed.

It also means that one’s expectation could not be met in the desired way and hence can be considered a failure.

Failure happens when something breaks down unexpectedly, when a machine is unable to perform its operations in the designated manner or when it provides an outcome in an unexpected fashion.

Failure is perceived in different ways by different people according to their nature.

Some see failure as the end of the road and choose a different road leaving behind the road already travelled.

Some others see failure as a temporary low phase and put in efforts to rise again and see success later on.

Some just lock themselves with their failures, not being able to accept the truth and sit with it for ages to come.   

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Possible reasons that lead to Failure

Failure can occur anywhere and to anyone. In the most common example, we may consider a person trying to start his vehicle routinely to go to his workplace.

When the vehicle started normally every other day, there was absolutely no problem faced.

One day suddenly when the vehicle does not turn on, there is a failure from the part of the vehicle to be unable to get started.

The rider of the vehicle then looks out for alternate means to reach his office and probably when he comes back from his work, he might consider getting his vehicle repaired.

Here, the vehicle showed up failure when it was tried to start, not because it was angry on the rider.

The reasons that led to the failure to start up could be many. May be the rider neglected certain warning signs indicating slowdown of the vehicle.

May be the rider did not bother to maintain the vehicle properly. May be the vehicle faced with a sudden mechanical glitch, that was unexpected by both the vehicle and the rider.

Whatever the reason be, but a failure does not happen all by itself. It is a clear phenomenon and behind every failure lays a list of possibilities that eventually led to it.   

Exploring some generic possibilities about why people see failure in their lives, the list could be as big as the universe itself. Every person has different reasons why he met with a failure in a certain thing he did.

Exploring those reasons and working on them to avoid repeating them in future will avoid meeting with failure for the same thing, another time. Let’s say a student failed in his board exams.

The list of possibilities for his failure could be many. The most obvious reason may be that he did not study up well.

May be the child’s concentration was poor and so he could not focus on what was really required for his exams. May be he had health issues.

May be he forgot to write the relevant answers in the exam leading to his failure. There could be so many possibilities.

What happens right after the student gets to know that he has failed in his exams is the next question in line.

The student obviously feels dejected and if his parents understand their child and are supportive enough, they will first discuss the same with their child in a calm manner.

The student at this stage feels a little comforting feel from his parents but would still be wondering why he was chosen to see the failure he just met with.

If a positive environment is created for the child, very soon he would start looking out for reasons that led to the bad results.

If he is doomed in negativity, he would forget the whole world around him and dip himself in darkness not knowing what to do next.   

Accepting Failure

Why is the word ‘failure’ such a dreaded thing in our minds, such that everybody wishes to taste success without meeting failure on their paths?

Let us again take the instance of a little toddler beginning to walk. Why does it so happen that the child keeps baby steps at first and then slowly learns to walk all by himself, why is that the act of walking is not a one-shot effort, but a continuous self-effort that the child puts in unconsciously and gathers pace?

The explanation is quite simple. When the toddler is learning to keep baby steps, he falls very often. But the toddler never stops himself from getting up and trying all over again.

He keeps repeating this act and finally manages to walk all by himself. This repeated act of getting up and falling down is also accompanied by a measure of self confidence which the child receives by himself at every stage of his fall.

Why can’t we adults apply the same act of getting up whenever we fall down, once we are grown up?   

The child doesn’t see success easily. After multiple repeated efforts he finally manages to walk, but the catch here is, at no point does the child ever stop trying to become successful.

The repeated attempts to finally make it happen is what takes a person out of the failure zone and gets him working towards his success zone.

This can be elaborated thus. Whenever we find ourselves in a bad state of failure, assuming we have failed in exams compared to our friends, it is fine to feel bad about it for some time.

After a while, we should start thinking why we actually couldn’t be successful in our exams.

After finding out the reasons for us, the next best thing to do would be to accept our failure and take self responsibility for it. Accepting failure in itself is a very big step which guides us on what is to be done next.

Sitting with failure, cursing ourselves for not doing things the right way, blaming others for our failures etc does not solve the problem in any way.

Marching ahead and preparing ourselves to think forward is simply the way out. Write down possibilities that may help clear exams in the next attempt. Prepare strategies to work effectively.   

Marching towards Success from Failure

It is very clear that sitting down with failure leads us to nowhere. Learning from past failures and not repeating the same mistakes again lead us towards success.

Failure is not the end of the world. If we have failed in a certain attempt, we should consider it as a learning step and rise up the ladder to make another attempt.

All attempts made may not be fruitful. Success is not guaranteed immediately after an episode of failure.   

When we say a person is successful in his chosen field, it certainly doesn’t mean that the person has never come across failure in his life.

It only means that the person had determination to rise up whenever he had downfalls and finally managed to taste success.

The most successful people in this world are the ones who have met failure the maximum number of times in their attempts.

But out of their grit, they stood up tall and strong, learnt from their mistakes and worked things in the right way. There is always another chance given whenever we go wrong or whenever we saw failure.

Realizing the pain of failure tells us how difficult it is to achieve success in life.

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Success and Failure Are Not What You Think

Personal perspective: love what you do and who you’re with..

Posted May 14, 2024 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods

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When I was in my 20s, all I wanted was to be famous, and I wasn’t. Not yet. My friend Jane said that while she wanted success, too, what she wanted more was to be in a good relationship, that she’d be happy if she had a husband, some kids, a home that made her feel good, work that she loved. I thought she was crazy. I wanted more.

Last month, my newest book came out, Days of Wonder . It was one I was really worried about. I was afraid if the sales weren’t good, I would be dropped by my publisher. I thought my life would fall apart if that happened.

My career has always jumped around. My first novel was such a success, I was flown to New York City (I was living in Pittsburgh at the time). I was feted and famous. I thought it would last forever, and of course, it didn’t, to my confusion and disbelief. I bounced around publishers. Some went out of business. At others, my editors left. And then my eighth novel, Pictures of You , was rejected on contract as not being special enough, and because my sales had not been so hot.

I fell apart. The stories I told myself had to do with being a terrible writer. Being a failure. I wailed and couldn’t be comforted until a friend got my book to Algonquin, which not only published it, but made it a New York Times bestseller its first week and got it into six printings. My sales were suddenly so huge, I thought my royalty checks must surely be a mistake because no one made that much money.

The experience taught me a lesson: Things can change. And they would.

The pandemic slashed my sales, and I began to worry about Days of Wonder . My first two advance reviews of the book were not exactly stellar, and I knew what that meant. I was a failure. The stores wouldn’t want my novel. Readers wouldn’t want my novel. My career was over. I cried. I really wept because I saw no way out of this. And I decided the thing to do was to put my head down and do what I loved: write. To not even think about this book, but to give it up to the universe.

I think the universe listened.

Suddenly, the day before publication, I had a full-page rave review in the Los Angeles Times . I had raves from Bustle and Oprah Daily and NPR and the New York Times . CBS TV/New York made me one of Mary Calvi’s top Lit Picks, and CBS called me up to have my own segment on TV. I was drawing crowds and praise. Then, I won a grant from the Midatlantic Arts Foundation/New Jersey Foundation of the Arts for part of Days of Wonder .

Annie Lamott told me this wonderful story, of a friend of hers, who finally won an Oscar. He got on the stage, crying joyfully. He thanked everyone and then he came home and called Annie. “So?” she asked him. “You feel good about yourself now?” He answered, “For about ten minutes.”

So, I, too, have my ten minutes. I will never not be dazzled that I got to be on CBS, that I got to be on NPR, and I am insanely grateful for all the people who thought I was doing so well, that I was famous again, but, in a way, it’s like the make-up I had to spackle on to be on TV. I wash it off, this feeling of success, to the essentials. I know that a career, like a life, can have ups and downs. I know, too, that what kept me sane through all of this was my husband, my son, and my friends who were there to listen to me weep when I thought I had failed, who cheered me on when I succeeded, who remind me that they love me. When I shared my failures and tears with people who loved me, I felt soothed and supported. When I shared my success with them, part of my joy was seeing my friends’ joy.

I know that you can live two lives at the same time: that you can think of yourself as a success and as a failure, and that it can change from moment to moment. I find that oddly positive. It’s like a gift. A message that things can quickly switch. My novel has been out only three weeks. I know there is more media promotion and touring to come. But I also know what to do about the whole issue of success.

I put my head down and I work on a new novel. I call my friends to come have lunch. I go to my doctor's appointments. And I love my husband and my son even more. In the end, my friend Jane got what she wanted: the kids, the partner, the home she loves, and the success. She’s excitedly working on a wonderful new script, pouring love and care into it, seeing the process, rather than the results. That’s what we all should do, I think.

Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times Bestselling author of 12 novels, including Pictures of You , Is This Tomorrow , Cruel Beautiful World , and With or Without You.

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‘Failure to Thrive,’ or a Failure to Investigate?

An outdated medical term often masks treatable illnesses, health experts contend.

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By Rachel E. Gross

• May 13, 2024

The word “failure” is rampant in medicine. Hearts, livers, lungs, and kidneys all “fail,” which simply means they cease to do their job. But the failures that patients tend to remember are the ones that seem to indict not an organ but an entire person. Just ask anyone who has been told that they have “failed” vaginal delivery (meaning that labor was slow or the cervix didn’t dilate) or “failed” chemotherapy (meaning that the tumor didn’t respond to treatment).

Worst among these phrases, many doctors say, is a common diagnosis for both infants and older adults: “failure to thrive.”

In pediatrics, the term refers to infants who struggle to hit key milestones in size, weight and cognitive development. When Dr. Deborah Frank, a retired pediatrician, was in medical school in the 1970s, the diagnosis meant one of two things: “Either you had major congenital heart disease or cystic fibrosis, or you had a bad mother,” she said. “Or maybe you had both.”

If the term sounds slightly accusatory, that’s because it is. It arose from the idea that struggling infants were ailing not because of any underlying disease or lack of nutrients but because of poor parenting.

The first known appearance of “failure to thrive” was in the 1933 edition of a medical textbook, “The Diseases of Infancy and Childhood.” An explanation for the condition came near the end of World War II, when René Spitz, an Austrian psychoanalyst, observed that infants in a Mexican orphanage tended to be listless, scrawny and slow to develop.

This concerning syndrome, Spitz surmised, resulted from a lack of “maternal affection, maternal care and maternal love.” Pediatrics took the idea and ran with it​ — “in the fine old tradition of mother-blaming,” Dr. Frank said. (A similar psychoanalytic idea that became popular around this time was “refrigerator mother theory,” which posited, incorrectly, that autism was caused by “cold mothering.”)

That thinking remained in the mainstream in pediatrics until the 1980s, when some doctors began questioning whether, by blaming mothers , they had failed to pay enough attention to another key factor: nutrition. In 1984, Dr. Frank founded a pediatric clinic and food pantry at the Boston City Hospital for children growing up in poverty. She called it the Failure to Thrive Clinic.

While the intentions were sound, the undertones were not lost on some parents. A donor to the clinic, herself a mother, soon pointed out the obvious: “Who wants to bring their kid to the failure clinic?” Dr. Frank recalled being asked. She changed the name to the Grow Clinic.

Just as pediatricians were beginning to challenge the wisdom of this term, the use of “failure to thrive” spread to a new field, geriatrics. In 1976, three neurologists noted the similarity between this “well-defined pediatric syndrome” and a pattern of muscle wasting and cognitive decline in some of their older patients that led to sudden death. Before long, adult “failure to thrive” had become an official diagnosis and a research priority for the Institute of Medicine. Like a virus jumping from species to species, it had made the jump across specialties. And in this field, too, problems soon appeared.

Geriatrics is a field of sleuthing. To solve medical enigmas, doctors must become detectives, teasing out the effects of overlapping causes that include chronic conditions, acute injuries, social factors and the normal process of aging. It is a challenge that tests the patience of many doctors; the number of certified geriatricians in the United States, now just over 7,000, has been decreasing since 2017.

By masquerading as a diagnosis, the term “failure to thrive” cuts that sleuthing process short, shutting down inquiry before doctors can determine the real cause, said Dr. Clara Tsui, a geriatrician at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last month, she saw the label in the medical notes of an 82-year-old man with Alzheimer’s, who had fallen and hit his head. Even though a brain scan showed internal bleeding, the man had been diagnosed only with “failure to thrive” — which, Dr. Tsui noted, “is not a diagnosis at all.”

Dr. Martha Spencer, a geriatrician and colleague of Dr. Tsui at St. Paul’s, called the phrase vague, demeaning and ageist. “It baffles me as to why it’s lingered so long,” she said.

In 2020, Dr. Spencer and Dr. Tsui led a study that found that older patients who were given the label “failure to thrive” waited significantly longer to be admitted to a hospital. Once admitted, these patients experienced longer hospital stays, which are known to increase the risk of infection and other complications. By the time these patients were released, most of them — 88 percent — had received specific diagnoses, such as kidney failure or severe dehydration.

In other words, the authors concluded, the “failure” label tended to mask treatable illnesses, while burdening the patient with unnecessary delays in their care. A diagnosis of “failure” could become a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading doctors to assume that they were just another older patient on the inevitable path to decline. (Similarly, researchers have found that “acopia,” a bit of medicalese that literally means “not coping” and is still sometimes used in the U.K. and Australia, often leads doctors to overlook acute illnesses.)

The term is the diagnostic equivalent of throwing one’s hands up and saying there is nothing more to do, said Dr. Catherine Sarkisian, a geriatrician at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine: “‘We’re done here, you’re already going down the drain.’”

Dr. Sarkisian first encountered the geriatric incarnation of “failure to thrive” when both her grandmothers received the diagnosis, for different reasons. The label struck her as “arguably inappropriate” to apply to older adults, who were not expected to grow and develop in the same way young children are. “Maybe it’s OK not to thrive when you’re in your 90s, but your life is still worth living,” she said.

In 1996, Dr. Sarkisian and her mentor, Dr. Mark Lachs, argued that doctors ought to stop using the term. The general concept, though, was not new . As a resident, Dr. Lachs, now a geriatrician at Weill Cornell Medicine, often heard older patients labeled with ‘the dwindles,’ which was “basically lazy shorthand for ‘I don’t know what’s going wrong and I haven’t really evaluated and I can’t find anything,’” he said.

In pediatrics, the term can also function as an unhelpful catchall diagnosis. “It’s a wastebasket of things we put children into when we don’t understand what the specific cause of their problems is,” said Dr. Jeanne Lewandowski, a pediatric palliative care physician and chief of pediatrics at Corewell Health Beaumont Grosse Pointe Hospital in Detroit.

Dr. Lewandowski’s concern differs from Dr. Spencer’s: Many of her patients are nearing the end of their young lives, and there is nothing medicine can do for them. To her, “failure to thrive” is a way for doctors to avoid admitting that they don’t have the answer, by foisting blame onto the patient instead.

“The challenge with these words is that somehow it’s either the fault of the baby or the fault of the parent,” Dr. Lewandowski said. “As if, if they only tried harder, they could have gotten better.”

The diagnosis remains common in pediatrics, despite efforts in the literature to replace it with the more neutral “growth faltering.” All 65 children that Dr. Lewandowski currently cares for in hospice had “failure to thrive” written somewhere in their charts, she said.

Geriatrics is slowly gravitating toward use of the term “frailty,” which captures a vulnerability to stressors and relies on a more quantitative definition. Still, Dr. Spencer said she comes across “failure to thrive’ several times a week. Her goal before retiring is to see her institution break the habit, and be more thoughtful in exploring the causes of an older patient’s decline.

Achieving that will require doctors to have patience, and a willingness to spend more time in the discomfort of the unknown. “In medicine there’s always a reluctance to say ‘I don’t know,’” she said. “We need to be curious, rather than dismissive.”

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Understanding a broken heart Recurrent heart failure linked to accumulated stress in immunity-forming stem cells Research news

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• Graduate School of Medicine / Faculty of Medicine

May 25, 2024

Maintaining a happy heart. A healthy diet, active lifestyle and adequate sleep are all known to help maintain and improve cardiovascular health, but some people may still be at risk due to a number of factors, such as family history and age. © Perfect Wave 003/ Envato Elements

The stress of heart failure is remembered by the body and appears to lead to recurrent failure, along with other related health issues, according to new research. Researchers have found that heart failure leaves a “stress memory” in the form of changes to the DNA modification of hematopoietic stem cells, which are involved in the production of blood and immune cells called macrophages. These immune cells play an important role in protecting heart health. However, a key signaling pathway (a chain of molecules which relays signals inside a cell), called transforming growth factor beta (TGF-β), in the hematopoietic stem cells was suppressed during heart failure, negatively affecting macrophage production. Improving TGF-β levels could be a new avenue for treating recurrent heart failure, while detecting accumulating stress memory could provide an early warning system before it occurs.

Healthier lives and improved well-being are among the United Nations’ global Sustainable Development Goals. Positively, a recent study shows that life expectancy worldwide is projected to increase by about 4.5 years by 2050 . Much of this is thanks to public health efforts to prevent disease and improved survival from illnesses, such as cardiovascular disorders. However, heart disease is still the leading cause of death worldwide, with 26 million people estimated to be affected by heart failure.

Illustration of stress buildup in stem cells. This illustration shows that during heart failure, stress signals are transmitted to the brain, which then communicates through the nerves to the hematopoietic stem cells in the bone marrow, accumulating as stress memory. The stress-accumulated stem cells produce immune cells with reduced protective capabilities for organs such as the heart, kidneys, and muscles. © 2024 Y. Nakayama, K. Fujiu, T. Oshima et al./ Science Immunology

Once heart failure has occurred, it has a tendency to reoccur along with other health issues, such as kidney and muscle problems. Researchers in Japan wanted to understand what causes this recurrence and the deterioration of other organs, and whether it can be prevented.

“Based on our earlier research, we hypothesized that recurrence may be caused by stress experienced during heart failure accumulating in the body, particularly in hematopoietic stem cells,” explained Project Professor Katsuhito Fujiu from the Graduate School of Medicine at the University of Tokyo. Hematopoietic stem cells are found in bone marrow and are the source of blood cells and a type of immune cell called macrophages, which help to protect heart health.

By studying mice with heart failure, the researchers found evidence of stress imprinting on the epigenome, that is, chemical changes occurred to the mice’s DNA. An important signaling pathway, called the transforming growth factor beta, which is involved in regulating many cellular processes, was suppressed in the hematopoietic stem cells of mice with heart failure, leading to the production of dysfunctional immune cells.

This change persisted over an extended period of time, so when the team transplanted bone marrow from mice with heart failure into healthy mice, they found that the stem cells continued to produce dysfunctional immune cells. The latter mice later developed heart failure and became prone to organ damage.

Echocardiography of mice hearts. Transplantation of bone marrow from mice with heart failure (TAC, meaning transverse aortic constriction) into healthy mice (control) led to cardiac dysfunction, as shown in this echocardiogram. The light blue lines represent the motion of the anterior and posterior walls of the heart. In the upper diagram, the movement is vigorous and healthy. By contrast, in the lower diagram, the movement is impaired, and the distance between the walls is widened. This is characteristic of heart failure, where the heart's movement deteriorates and the heart enlarges. © 2024 Y. Nakayama, K. Fujiu, T. Oshima et al./ Science Immunology

“We termed this phenomenon stress memory because the stress from heart failure is remembered for an extended period and continues to affect the entire body. Although various other types of stress might also imprint this stress memory, we believe that the stress induced by heart failure is particularly significant,” said Fujiu.

The good news is that by identifying and understanding these changes to the TGF-β signaling pathway, new avenues are now open for potential future treatments. “Completely new therapies could be considered to prevent the accumulation of this stress memory during hospitalization for heart failure,” said Fujiu. “In animals with heart failure, supplementing additional active TGF-β has been shown to be a potential treatment. Correcting the epigenome of hematopoietic stem cells could also be a way to deplete stress memory.”

Now that it has been identified, the team hopes to develop a system that can detect and prevent the accumulation of stress memory in humans, with a long-term goal of being able to not only prevent the recurrence of heart failure, but also catch the condition before it can fully develop.

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Fear of uncontrolled immigration is upsetting the political landscape in the run-up to the presidential election.

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At a rally in December, former president Donald Trump went as far as to say that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

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Americans’ mistrust of new immigrants is hardly new. In fact, it exhibits a striking resemblance to the prevailing fears 100 years ago.

The country might soon need to “station a soldier every hundred yards on our borders to keep out the hordes,” argued an article in Wisconsin in April of 1924.

Treating Japan in the same way as “ white nations, ” an Illinois newspaper cautioned in May of 1924, could allow Japanese immigrants to own land and seek the “ rights given white immigrants. ”

“ America, ” wrote James J. Davis, the secretary of labor, in the New York Times in February of 1924, should not be “ a conglomeration of racial groups, each advocating a different set of ideas and ideals according to their bringing up, but a homogeneous race. ”

How America tried and failed to stay White

100 years ago the u.s. tried to limit immigration to white europeans. instead, diversity triumphed., “i think that we have sufficient stock in america now for us to shut the door.”.

That sounds like Donald Trump, right? Maybe on one of his campaign stops? It certainly fits the mood of the country. This year, immigration became voters’ “ most important problem ” in Gallup polling for the first time since Central Americans flocked to the border in 2019. More than half of Americans perceive immigrants crossing the border illegally as a “ critical threat .”

Yet the sentiment expressed above is almost exactly 100 years old. It was uttered by Sen. Ellison DuRant Smith , a South Carolina Democrat, on April 9, 1924. And it helped set the stage for a historic change in U.S. immigration law, which imposed strict national quotas for newcomers that would shape the United States’ ethnic makeup for decades to come.

Immigration was perceived as a problem a century ago, too. Large numbers of migrants from Eastern and Southern Europe flocked to the United States during the first two decades of the 20th century, sparking a public outcry over unfamiliar intruders who lacked the Northern and Western European blood of previous migrant cohorts.

On May 15, 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act , which would constrain immigration into the United States to preserve, in Smith’s words, America’s “pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock.”

“It is for the preservation of that splendid stock that has characterized us that I would make this not an asylum for the oppressed of all countries,” Smith continued , speaking of America not 40 years after the Statue of Liberty was erected in New York Harbor, with its open arms for all humankind. Immigration, Smith noted, should be shaped “to assimilate and perfect that splendid type of manhood that has made America the foremost Nation in her progress and in her power.”

The act set the rules of who’s in and who’s out. Here is what happened:

In the 1800s, most immigrants arriving in the United States came from Western and Northern Europe . By the early 1900s, that flow changed to Eastern and Southern European countries , such as Italy, Russia and Hungary.

The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act established narrow national quotas. Immigration from Asia and Eastern and Southern Europe was slashed to a trickle.

Western and Northern European countries such as Germany, Britain and Ireland were given the largest allowances.

The act did not set quotas for immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, including Canada, Mexico, and countries in the Caribbean and South America .

The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 undid the national quotas, and immigration surged afterward.

Despite continued attempts to preserve the nation’s White European identity, immigrants today come from a diverse range of nations, mostly in the Global South.

Fast-forward 100 years and the United States no longer has quotas. But it still has not landed on an immigration policy it can live with. Trump asks why the United States can’t take in immigrants only from “ nice countries, you know, like Denmark, Switzerland ,” instead of “countries that are a disaster.” President Biden, who not even four years ago wanted to grant citizenship to millions of unauthorized immigrants, today wants to “ shut down the border right now .”

All the while, desperate immigrants from around the world keep fleeing poverty, repression and violence, launching themselves into the most perilous journey of their lives to reach the United States.

The public conversation over immigration that has raged at least since the days of the 1924 Johnson-Reed law can explain Washington’s policy failure: There is no way America can reconcile the sentiments embodied by the Statue of Liberty — “Give me your tired, your poor,” etc. — with its deep-seated fear that immigrants will reshape its ethnic makeup, its identity and the balance of political power.

Try as they might, policymakers have always been unable to protect the White America they wanted to preserve. Today’s “melting pot” was built largely with policies that didn’t work. Millions upon millions of migrants have overcome what obstacles the United States has tried to put in their way.

Israel Zangwill’s play “The Melting Pot” — which opened at the Columbia Theatre in D.C. on Oct. 5, 1908 — has a narrow understanding of diversity by current standards. The play was an ersatz “Romeo and Juliet,” featuring a Jewish Russian immigrant and a Christian Russian immigrant. But it carried a lofty message. “Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians — into the crucible with you all!” trumpets David Quixano, the main character. “God is making the American.”

Americans, however, were already uncomfortable with that fluid sense of identity. In 1910, two years after the debut of Zangwill’s play, geneticist Charles Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. It provided the intellectual grounding for America’s increasingly overt xenophobia.

In “Heredity in Relation to Eugenics,” Davenport wrote that Italians had a “tendency to crimes of personal violence,” that Jews were prone to “intense individualism and ideals of gain at the cost of any interest,” and that letting more of them in would make the American population “darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial,” as well as “more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape, and sex-immorality.”

Harry Laughlin, another Cold Spring Harbor researcher, told members of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee in 1922 that these new immigrants brought “inferior mental and social qualities” that couldn’t be expected “to raise above, or even to approximate,” those of Americans descended from earlier, Northern and Western European stock.

The Johnson-Reed Act wasn’t the first piece of legislation to protect the bloodstream from the outside world. That would have been the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which kept Chinese migrants out for six decades. In general, though, immigration law before World War I excluded people based on income and education, as well as physical and moral qualities — not on ethnicity and its proxy, nation of origin.

In 1907, “imbeciles, feeble minded persons, unaccompanied children under 17 years of age” and those “mentally or physically defective” were put on the excluded list, alongside women coming for “prostitution or for any other immoral purpose.” The Immigration Act of 1917 tried to limit immigration to the literate.

But the large number of migrants arriving from Eastern and Southern Europe since the turn of the 20th century refocused the national debate. In 1907, Congress established the Dillingham Commission , which would reach for arguments from eugenics to recommend choosing migrants to maintain existing American bloodlines via “the limitation of the number of each race arriving each year” to a percentage of those living in the United States years before. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 did just that, establishing the first specific national quotas.

In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act completed the project, reshaping the nation’s identity over the next four decades. It set an overall ceiling of 165,000 immigrants per year, about 20 percent of the average before World War I, carefully allotting quotas for preferred bloodstreams. Japanese people were completely excluded , as were Chinese people. Elsewhere, the act established national quotas equivalent to 2 percent of citizens from each country recorded in the 1890 U.S. Census. Germans received 51,227 slots; Greeks just 100. Nearly 160,000 Italians had entered the United States every year in the first two decades of the century. Their quota was set at less than 4,000.

And, so, the melting pot was purified — and emptied: Two years after the Johnson-Reed Act, sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild published “The Melting-Pot Mistake,” a reiteration of the racial logic that undergirded all the new restrictions. By 1970, immigrants made up less than 5 percent of the population, down from nearly 15 percent in 1910.

There can be “no doubt that if America is to remain a stable nation it must continue to be a white man’s country for an indefinite period to come,” Fairchild wrote . “An exclusion policy toward all non-white groups is wholly defensible in theory and practice, however questionable may have been the immediate means by which this policy has been put into effect at successive periods in our history.”

And yet perhaps the most important lesson to flow from this moment is that the levee didn’t hold. Today, immigrants are back at 14 percent of the population. And despite the repeated efforts over the decades to preserve the ethnic purity proposed in Johnson-Reed, the pot filled up with undesirables again. Migrants from Europe accounted for three-quarters of the foreign-born in 1960 but only 10 percent in 2022 .

The Statue of Liberty is arguably the nation’s most prominent symbol, representing America as a land of opportunity and refuge. But the nation’s tolerance of outsiders has mostly been shaped by baser instincts, a tug of war between the hunger for foreign labor to feed a galloping economy and the fear of how the newcomers might change what it means to be American.

Immigration restrictions relax when the immigrant population is comparatively small and jobs plentiful, and they tighten when the foreign footprint increases and jobs get relatively scarce. Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute points out that even recent migrants turn against newer cohorts, fearful that they may take their jobs and transform their communities.

Fifteen percent, Chishti suggests, might be the point when the uneasy equilibrium tips decidedly against newcomers. Foreign-born people amounted to about 15 percent of the population when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, and again when the Johnson-Reed Act was signed into law.

Restrictive immigration laws

were passed after the foreign-born

population reached 15 percent.

Share of the population born outside the United States

Celler Act,

Ultimately, policies

meant to preserve

a White America failed.

Share of the population that is not White

Source: Analysis of U.S. Census and American

Community Survey data through IPMUS

Restrictive immigration laws were passed

after the foreign-born population

reached 15 percent.

Ultimately, policies meant to preserve

Source: Analysis of U.S. Census and American Community Survey

data through IPMUS

Source: Analysis of U.S. Census and American Community Survey data through IPMUS

39% in 2022

15% in 2022

In the 1960s, when the foreign-born share was dropping to about 5 percent of the population, however, other considerations became more important. In 1965, the quotas established four decades earlier were finally disowned.

Their demise was, in part, a barefaced attempt to woo the politically influential voting bloc of Italian Americans, who had a hard time bringing their relatives to the United States under the 1924 limits. There was a foreign policy motivation, too: The quotas arguably undermined the international position of the United States, emerging then as a leader of the postwar order in a decolonizing world.

The story Americans most like to hear is that the end of the quotas was a natural outcome of the civil rights movement, in tension with the race-based preferences implicit in the immigration law. “Everywhere else in our national life, we have eliminated discrimination based on one’s place of birth,” Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy said in 1964. “Yet this system is still the foundation of our immigration law.”

But the most interesting aspect of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, which did away with the quotas, lies in what it did not try to change. Though the new immigration law removed quotas by nationality, it did not abandon the project of protecting the predominant European bloodstream from inferior new strains. It just changed the instrument: It replaced national quotas with family ties .

Rep. Michael Feighan, an Ohio Democrat who chaired the House subcommittee on immigration, ditched the original idea of replacing the nationality quotas with preferences for immigrants with valuable skills. In their place, he wrote in preferences for the family members of current residents, which ensured new arrivals remained European and White.

It was paramount to preserve America as it was. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who managed the passage of Hart-Celler through the Senate, promised his fellow Americans that the new legislation “will not upset the ethnic mix of our society.”

“This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions,” President Lyndon B. Johnson claimed on Oct. 3, 1965, as he signed the Hart-Celler Act into law at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. “It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.”

That didn’t quite work out as planned. Migrants allowed in under Hart-Celler have ushered in an America that looks very different from the one Johnson addressed. Half of the foreign born today come from Latin America; about 3 in 10 from Asia. Fewer than 6 in 10 Americans today are White and not of Hispanic origin, down from nearly 9 in 10 in 1965. Hispanics account for about one-fifth of the population. African Americans make up nearly 14 percent; Asian Americans just over 6 percent.

Share of the population that

is not White or is Hispanic

Race-specific population includes Hispanics.

Other non-White

Native American

Multiple races

W hite Hispanic

Source: U.S. Census and American Community

Survey through IPUMS. Data through 2019,

the most recent comparable numbers.

White Hispanic

Source: U.S. Census and American Community Survey

through IPUMS. Data through 2019, the most recent

comparable numbers.

Share of the population that is

not White or is Hispanic

Source: U.S. Census and American Community Survey through IPUMS. Data through 2019, the most recent

And some of the old arguments are back. In 2017, the Harvard economist George J. Borjas published a tome about foreigners’ impact on the United States, in which he updated the debate over migrant quality to the post-1965 era: Newer cohorts, mostly from Latin America and other countries in the Global South were, he said, worse than earlier migrants of European stock. “Imagine that immigrants do carry some baggage with them,” he wrote. “That baggage, when unloaded in the new environment, dilutes some of the North’s productive edge.”

That the Hart-Celler law did, in fact, drastically change the nature of the United States is arguably the single most powerful reason that U.S. immigration politics have again taken a dark, xenophobic turn. But even as arguments from eugenics are getting a new moment in the sun to justify new rounds of draconian immigration restrictions, the six decades since 1965 suggest the project to preserve a White European America has already lost.

What went wrong? Much of Europe got rich, and this dramatically reduced its citizens’ incentive to move to the United States. Instead, immigrants from poorer reaches of the planet — from Asia but predominantly from Latin America — took the opportunity to invite their relatives into the land of opportunity.

As usual, the U.S. economy’s appetite for foreign labor played a large role. Mexicans, like people from across the Americas, had been mostly ignored by immigration law. They were not subject to the 1924 quotas, perhaps because there weren’t that many of them coming into the United States or perhaps because their labor was needed in the Southwest — especially during the world wars.

Mexicans suffered periodic backlashes, such as when the Hoover administration figured that kicking out millions of Mexicans and Mexican-looking Americans was a smart political move in response to the Great Depression, or when President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched “ Operation Wetback ,” a mass deportation effort created ostensibly to raise wages in the South.

In any event, the first quota for immigrants from the Western Hemisphere as a whole came with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Nonetheless, the story of immigration after that was largely a Mexican affair. By 2000, Mexicans accounted for 30 percent of the foreign-born population, up from 6 percent 40 years earlier.

Unsurprisingly, the zeitgeist again took to worrying about the pollution of the American spirit. Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington fretted that “the persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages.”

And still, the U.S. political system proved powerless to stem the tide. U.S. economic interests — and the draw they exerted on immigrants from Mexico and other unstable economies south of the border — overpowered the ancestral fears.

The last major shot at immigration reform passed in Congress, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 , was based on a supposed grand bargain, which included offering legal status to several million unauthorized immigrants, bigger guest-worker programs to sate employers’ demands for labor and a clampdown on illegal work that came with a penalty on employers who hired unauthorized workers.

Employers, of course, quickly found a workaround. Unauthorized migration from Mexico surged, and the mass legalization opened the door to family-based chain migration on a large scale, as millions of newly legalized Mexican immigrants brought their family members into the country. In 1980, there were 2.2 million Mexican immigrants in the United States. By 2022, there were 11 million .

Migration today, again, has taken a new turn. Migrants are no longer mostly single Mexicans crossing the border surreptitiously to melt into the U.S. labor force. They are families, and they come from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and Ecuador, China and India. Mexicans accounted for fewer than a quarter of migrant encounters with U.S. agents along the border in the first half of fiscal 2024.

The most explosive difference is that immigration today is much more visible than it has possibly ever been. Immigrants don’t try to squeeze across the border undetected. They cross it without permission, turn themselves in and ask for asylum, overwhelming immigration courts and perpetuating the image of a border out of control.

Americans’ sense of threat might have more to do with the chaos at the border than with immigration itself. Still, the sense of foreboding draws from that same old well of fear. That fear is today arguably more acute than when ethnic quotas were written into U.S. immigration law in 1924. Because today, the White, Anglo-Saxon Americans who believe this nation to be their birthright are truly under demographic siege.

Twenty years from now, White, non-Hispanic Americans will slip below 50 percent of the population and become just another, albeit big, minority. For Trump’s electoral base of older, White rural voters, the prospect of non-Whites acquiring power to challenge their status as embodiments of American identity amounts to an existential menace that may justify radical action.

Immigration has reengineered U.S. politics. Non-White voters account for some 40 percent of Democrats . Eighty-one percent of Republican voters, by contrast, are both White and not Hispanic. The nation’s polarized politics have become, in some nontrivial sense, a proxy for a conflict between different interpretations of what it means to be American.

The renewed backlash against immigration has little to offer the American project, though. Closing the door to new Americans would be hardly desirable, a blow to one of the nation’s greatest sources of dynamism. Raw data confirms how immigrants are adding to the nation’s economic growth , even while helping keep a lid on inflation .

Anyway, that horse left the stable. The United States is full of immigrants from, in Trump’s memorable words, “s---hole countries.” The project to set this in reverse is a fool’s errand. The 1924 Johnson-Reed immigration law might have succeeded in curtailing immigration. But the restrictions did not hold. From Presidents Johnson to Trump, efforts to circle the wagons around some ancestral White American identity failed.

We are extremely lucky it did. Contra Sen. Ellison DuRant Smith’s 100-year old prescriptions, the nation owes what greatness it has to the many different women and men it has drawn from around the world to build their futures. This requires a different conversation — one that doesn’t feature mass expulsions and concentration camps but focuses on constructing a new shared American identity that fits everyone, including the many more immigrants who will arrive from the Global South for years to come.

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Fear of Failure — The Fear of Failure As My Biggest Failure in Life

Why My Biggest Fear is Failure

• Categories: Failure Fear Fear of Failure

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Words: 595 |

Published: Sep 1, 2020

Words: 595 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited

• Brown, B. (2010). The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. Hazelden Publishing.
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• Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of personality and social psychology, 92(6), 1087.
• Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its Discontents. Hogarth Press.
• Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer Publishing Company.
• Pintrich, P. R., & Schunk, D. H. (2002). Motivation in Education: Theory, Research, and Applications (2nd ed.). Prentice Hall.
• Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78.
• Seligman, M. E. (2011). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. Atria Books.
• Sweeny, K., & Duckworth, A. L. (2019). Failure as Fuel: A Self-Regulatory Approach. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 13(11), e12508.
• Tice, D. M., & Bratslavsky, E. (2000). Giving in to feel good: The place of emotion regulation in the context of general self-control. Psychological Inquiry, 11(3), 149-159.

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