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Myles Cooper

12/3/14

INQ 110-U

Dr.Hanstedt

Failure

            Whether you want to believe it or not we seek failure. Whether we directly seek it out or indirectly seek it out really varies in any given situation, nonetheless we have a sort lust for failure you in our lives. So why do we seek it you ask? Failure allows us to get an introspective look at ourselves, it allows us see what is wrong with us, and try to fix our flaws so we don’t make those missteps again, and so we can reach our goals and be successful. Failure is crucial in one’s life, it can define you, whether you approach it properly, and it can also make you wiser in the process. Sarah Macdonald, the author of Holy Cow, and Aaron post blog post on how he became the lacrosse player he is today truly exemplify how an individual directly/indirectly seek out failure, and in the process it changes them.

            Aaron’s week 3 blog post focused on how he came to become the lacrosse player he is now. The driving force for his success was his failure early on, in the post Aaron goes into detail about his humble beginnings in the sport, he described the sport as “stupid and wanted nothing to

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do with it” (Heinle). That attitude indirectly caused him to fail in the beginning of his young career.

            “My parents still have a video from my first year of lacrosse, the ball rolled right by me I turned around bent over, picked up a dandelion, and then started to chase a nearby butterfly that had caught my attention.” (Heinle)

But with an introspective look at himself, Aaron made “a complete 180 degree turn around and now I loved it and couldn’t stop playing the sport” (Heinle). Aaron saw his flaws and pushed himself towards success, driven by his past failures, and now is playing for a college team.

            In the case of Sarah Macdonald, she herself was a very flawed individual, even though she had experience with going to India, she still failed to accept the taboos of the Indian culture Holy Cow during the beginning of the novel. She viewed the nation as a “vomit of hatred and a rambling rage against the bullshit, the pushing the shoving, the rip-offs, the cruelty, the crowds, the pollution, the weather, the begging, the performance of pity, the pissing, the shitting, the snotting, the spitting and the farting” (Macdonald 23). Macdonald failed to recognize the inner beauty of India’s culture, but she chose to come to India to fail, and be thrusted in to be uncomfortable and taboo situations so she could see her flaws and then change them. Later in the novel she made strides to fix her flaws, through finding some sort of spirituality. She has 3 spiritual moments in the novel: meditation, bathing in the Ganges, and her encounter with Amma, these experiences change her mentality about the nation; she described her experience in the Ganges as a “dose of the divine and a feeling that I’m part of a universal force” (Macdonald 147) where as her

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 experience with Amma made her feel a multitude of emotions, she says it was “a supernova of love sends sparks of pity, compassion, admiration and amazement through my being” (Macdonald 209). These experiences allowed Macdonald to suspend her cynicism, and be more welcoming to this nation’s cultures and taboos. This allowed her to grow and mature later in the novel as a person, especially when goes to Afghanistan and seems to connect more with the people’s culture, mostly spiritually.

            In the world of business failure is crucial. The reason is because “without failure there is no success” (Coelho, McClure), because the only way to achieve success is through failing, and recognizing and fix your flaws. In the world of business “failure leads to insights that are applicable to business management” (Coelho, McClure). As an individual in business if you don’t fail, success will be hard to come by. You can learn from the people within your group and the people outside about how to improve a product, and how to increase the productivity of creating it, along with the efficiency of the product through failure.

            A study was done by Peter Skillman, Spaghetti Problem, in which “he assembled a variety of different groups, from American students to 150 Taiwanese telecom engineers, and split them into smaller units of three or four at which point they were given twenty pieces of spaghetti, a meter of tape, a marshmallow and a piece of string” (McArdle 4) they were asked to basically create a structure to support the marshmallow. Now you are wondering how this experiment pertains to the topic of failure, well you see out of all the groups the engineers outperformed most, but even more surprisingly the kindergarteners who took part in the study outperformed most groups. Why? “They were not afraid of failure” (McArdle 4) quite the contrary they almost seeked it out. “By trying and failing they learned what didn’t work- which

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turned out to be all the knowledge they needed to figure out what did.” (McArdle 4). This experiment is a prime example on how we seek failure for the answer to our success, and how this is not only something adults seek, even children seek it, maybe even more than adults, because kids aren’t afraid of some of the ramifications of failure.

Failure is a crucial tool that we as humans us to find success in our daily lives. We reach that success by looking at failures, and fixing our flaws in the process. Aaron and Sarah both did that, in their respective narratives, and the Spaghetti Experiment gives you example an example of how people seek failure in a real life application(s), same can be said about the more business approach towards failure.

            So in conclusion we seek failure, through many facets of our life to reach our goals and to be successful in life. Failure allows us to take an introspective approach towards our life and allows us to fix our personal flaws, along with external flaws. This then allows to learn from our mistakes, and become successful.

Bibliography

Macdonald, Sarah. Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure. New York: Broadway, 2003. Print.

McArdle, Megan. "Failure Is Fundamental." The up Side of Down: Why failing    Well Is          the Key to Success. 1st ed. Vol. 1. New York City, New York: Penguin Group, 2014. 4. Print.

Coelho, Philip RP, and James E. McClure. "Learning from failure." American Journal of Business 20.1 (2005): 1-1.