Saturday, October 12, 2013

7A: The Beginning of Your Success Story

Growing up, we are encouraged to use all of our effort to succeed, and with success comes the rewards. When we play sports and win the championships, even as children, you get the bigger trophy. In school, if you get the better grades, you get a high GPA and have the better possibility of getting into the college of your choice. Our parents would push us towards success. Most know the feeling of receiving a bad grade on a report card and have your parents take away your cell phone, friend privileges or, in our younger years, our Gameboy or TV time. These punishments would push us to do better in the future so we would never have to be punished again.
Then again, if we hadn’t received that failure and punishment, we wouldn’t have ended up working so much harder to get those privileges we had lost in the first place back. “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement,” as said by C.S. Lewis. No one likes the feeling of failure, whether you hide it or not. When you fail at something, most will try to fix it so you and everyone around you will turn the disappointment into more of praise.
So does this mean that failure is good? Should we be praised for failing or harshly punished…or neither? Though I believe incentives can help spark success I don’t believe they should be used as a permanent; people should automatically be expected to put their very best work into something. And when a child is younger or even an adolescent and they do fail, maybe punishment or the retrieving of a treasured item can spark success.

But thinking about it, when you have truly failed, you are at your lowest of low and it cannot get worse. So the only thing left to do is just get up, brush yourself off, and try again, and no amount of yelling and/or punishing will change the fact that you messed up. You now have something to base your success on and know what doesn’t work for you and just try again. Failure isn’t the end, it’s the beginning of your success story.


Link to quote:  http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_failure.html#73DrWDO2TT1YSyl7.99





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