The importance of failure

Freshmen, as you begin the school year and start your remarkable journey here at Duke, I would like to begin with telling you all that through your Duke journey, you will most likely fail. Yes, freshmen, failure is inevitable and, in fact, something you should most definitely embrace.

Now, for some of you, this may sound incredibly disheartening. After all, for the most part, as Duke students, you are a talented, motivated, and brilliant young lot with amazing aspirations for a successful and bright future. Failure is something that you are hoping to avoid, but unfortunately, I want to tell you that failure is ultimately inevitable. If, however, you aspire to live horridly boring lives, confine yourself to the mundane and avoid all possible challenges in order to avoid failure. If you choose this path, I want to tell you that you are, ironically, failing as well because you aren’t exploring your fullest potential. Therefore, I have a suggestion to make. I want you to risk some failure. Don’t get me wrong. I am not telling you to fail out of your classes here at Duke and not to try your absolute best, but I do want you to allow yourselves the ability to fail once in a while.

Let me tell you a personal story. Like most freshmen, I came to Duke with high expectations for myself to succeed in everything that I possibly did. I hadn’t experienced very much of anything similar to failure before, and I was confident that all my activities, classes, exams and social and personal relationships would go smoothly. However, I found myself highly disappointed. After I saw a 45 percent on my first chemistry exam, I was overcome with an incredible fear of failure. I questioned whether I could truly succeed. I started to approach each exam with the fear that I wouldn't be able to finish, that despite the remarkable number of hours I invested in preparing for my exams, my endeavors would result in inevitable failure - failure that would engender unfathomable suffering and sorrow. I struggled. I cried. I worried myself to no avail. Yet, ironically, I began to realize that the more I feared failure, the more I began to fail. Failure, which hadn't been a common part of my life, began to feel normal. My intellectual endeavors and my previously spotless academic record began to decline. In a rigorously competitive environment like Duke, I felt as if I had no niche of my own.

You see, I had paralyzed myself with the fear of failure. I remember one day during my freshman year, I came across the story of the oyster and its formation of the pearl that thoroughly changed my perspective. Long story short, the oyster oozes a liquid which coats the grit entering its shell, allowing it to harden so that it does not cause tremendous pain and instead forms into a beautiful pearl. Thus, like an oyster, which upon feeling a grain of sand in its shell embraces it slowly turning it into a pearl, I began to embrace failure as a part of my life. Lo and behold, my faith in myself blossomed. I began facing each failure with the perspective that it was another painful grain of sand I needed to nurture patiently and courageously to transform into a pearl, and the more pearls I garnered, the richer my experiences as a Duke student would become.

Today, whenever I struggle with obstacles, I realize that I have two methods of approaching each problem - I can cry relentlessly and despair or, like the oyster, embrace each obstacle with patience and courage, allowing it to metamorphose into a pearl. I choose the latter route, believing that with each adversity that I overcome, I polish and develop my pearl within - my precious true self.

Hence, freshmen: I want you all to embrace failure. I do, however, want you all to fail well. What does it mean to fail well? To fail well means to learn from every failure along the steps of your journey in order to not repeat those errors again. To fail well also means to fail wisely and to seek guidance along the way from your professors, friends and older alumni that can help you during your time here at Duke. The people around you, your professors and advisors are all here to help you through your journey to success, for a little bit of failure is in the pathway of every individual’s quest for success.

Maryam Ali is a Trinity sophomore. Her columns run on alternate Fridays.