There’s this big fear of failure that we (or most people) have. We’re scared to screw up. We don’t want to make mistakes. We don’t want to be known as a failure. And there’s this gigantic negative connotation to failure that seems unjustified.
I feel like I’ve had a lot of failures in my life. I remember spelling the word “ellipse” wrong at a regional spelling bee because I thought it was spelled “eclipse” without the “c”. Sigh. I remember many of the pingpong matches that I lost and cried uncontrollably. I remember how hard I trained for the Olympics and how devastated I was when I didn’t make it. In college, I’ve taken a lot of exams where I’ve studied a lot and still did very poorly. There’s also been some relationship issues gone bad that still affects me greatly.
And I felt embarrassed by a lot of these things. Especially when people asked about them and I had to explain that I messed up in some way or not everything went to plan. And they always have responses like “Oh, you’ll get them next time” or “You just have to work harder” or some generic response.
But the thing is I really did try my best. And a lot of times, I felt that if I did my best, I felt entitled to the reward that I wanted to get from those actions. I felt like if I practiced more pingpong than everyone else, I would be better than everyone else. I felt like if I studied really hard on exams, I should get a good grade. But that’s not how life works. We don’t automatically deserve these things because we did our best.
Recently, I’ve been asked a lot of tough personal questions about my life and had to examine a lot of decisions I’ve made in the past and why I made them. And looking back on a lot of these memories, I’ve grown a lot through the painful times and the failures. All of the times that I questioned myself after losses and if I was even doing anything meaningful in my life and going through tough times that I thought would never end. All of the times I’ve felt alone and pointless and felt like I wasn’t good enough to amount to anything. And every time, I learn a little bit more about the world and a little bit more about myself.
Tough times never last, but tough people do.
Playing pingpong was one of the things that I think really built my resilience. Almost every tournament, I lost to someone. There’s just a lot of good players out there and even if I got very far in the rounds, there’s usually another player better than you. And it hurt that I trained so much and still wasn’t the best. And after every tournament, we would go back to the drawing board and continue working at it. And I learned to fight for everything even though I lost so many times because I had very high dreams.
And I feel like that resilience that I gained is what’s helped me do well at Berkeley even though the classes are extremely difficult. Everyone’s first exams at Berkeley are a surprise. It’s like getting thrown into a tidepool without knowing how to swim. And a lot of people who were used to getting good grades all of the time if they studied for things, got shook when they couldn’t swim. But I was used to working hard and not getting what I wanted, and it didn’t discourage me.
You learn a lot from failure. Failing means that you took a risk out of your comfort zone, and it didn’t work out. But you need to take risks to grow. If you’re succeeding at everything you’re doing, you’re playing life too safe. You need to be stretching yourself to grow, and that means sometimes finding out where your limits are and learning from them.
You really learn who you are as a person and what you’re capable of. When you succeed in your goals, it’s easy to celebrate and be happy and satisfied with life. But that’s not how life is all the time. And learning to go through life through the valleys and canyons is truly difficult.
One thing I really like about Silicon Valley is that there’s this sense now that failure isn’t a bad thing in the startup world. Most likely your first startup doesn’t succeed. How could it? You don’t know anything about running a company or finding market fit or getting investor funding or how hard it actually is to run a company. And once your company crashes and burns, you learn a little bit from the harsh lessons that you went through. And then you’re ready for round two.
I'm not saying that I don't feel embarrassed about failure at all anymore. I'm not saying I look forward to failure. I'm not saying that I've done all of the failing and my life is all uphill from here. I'm sure that there are many more difficult obstacles in my life that I will face. But I do appreciate the value of failure more these days, and I'm sure I have a lot to learn in the future from it. And it terrifies me.
Take risks. Don’t be afraid to try your best and fail. Listen to your own heart and not just the thoughts of what others want you’re your life. Challenge yourself. Celebrate the green lights in life, but remember when everything goes up in flames, you have to fight through the pain to come through the other side a better person.