Fraternizing with Failure

Divya Shiroor

As I write this, I’m starting my last week as a first year graduate student.  The past year has taught me many lessons, but the one I consider most valuable, is dealing with failure. At the end of this semester, everyone in my program had to give a talk about a laboratory rotation that we did. Just 5 minutes explaining the research, the problem we chose to tackle and the relevance of this problem. I was excited to talk about my project, I had an interesting result to share and was confident I could rattle off my spiel smoothly.

Divya Shiroor

I stepped up on stage, looked into the audience and for the first time ever, completely drew a blank. I tried to find my focus, somehow stumbled though my speech, leaving a big part of it out and walked off stage, completely mortified. This had never happened before. I enjoy talking about my work, I’m in love with the project I was going to talk about and stage fright has never been an issue. I simply couldn’t understand what went wrong and why I let myself down that day. For a brief period after getting off that stage, I felt like a complete failure.

I assume we’ve all felt like that at one time or another. Failing gets especially hard when it has consequences. In the scientific world, failure often translates into things like not getting a job or losing out on a fellowship. There has been buzz lately about a Princeton professor publishing his CV of failures. When I first heard about it, I was skeptical. Here is an assistant professor at an ivy league school. I was fairly certain that failure was not something he encountered regularly. Curiosity, however, got the better of me, and I snuck a peek. Reading his CV of failures was inspiring. I realized that he got to where he is despite what many would consider significant failures. If he had thrown in the towel when he didn’t get an academic position at Harvard or MIT or when he failed to get the Fulbright fellowship, he wouldn’t be where he is today.

Overcoming failure and learning how to deal with the feeling of humiliation that follows is hard. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how failure is such a big part of academia. When I first started graduate school I was extremely positive about academia. One year into grad school, that feeling has completely changed. When I think about a career in academia, all I can focus on are the difficulties associated with it. How post-docs are so grueling and how it’s so hard to get a tenure track position. I’m beginning to wonder if my questioning my motives behind pursuing an academic career have a lot to do with the fear of failing. I’ve let the statistics talk me into a corner of pessimism and I feel like I’m slowly forgetting why I fell in love with the field in the first place. When it comes to making a career in academia, I’m slowly realizing that the best thing to do is to decide if it’s the field for you, and if it is, make up your mind to succeed. Accept that failure (a lot of failure) is a part of the game and push past it. So here is my plan to overcome failure:

• Write up a CV of failures: There is no better motivation than seeing everything you have had to overcome to get to where you are. We tend to push our failures to the farthest recesses of our brain. Forgetting about it, however, may not be the best thing. Every failure is testament to having tried something, and deserves an applause. It is only by acknowledging our failures that we prevent them from defining us. We are so much more than a botched up talk, a rejected grant or a disregarded publication.
• Take time to process failures: Overcoming failure means realizing it’s ok to be miserable about it, for a finite period of time. The period shortly following failing is not a time to make momentous decisions. Never make an important decision in the haze of disappointment and humiliation that shadow failure. The haze is temporary and will most definitely pass. The consequences of the decisions you make in that moment however, might stick. The period immediately following failure is purely for wallowing with a bucket of ice cream and a sappy movie. Wallow completely and when you’re done, pick yourself up, dust it off, and get back up on the horse.

• Realize that its often necessary to rely on others for a pick-me-up: When I completely botched up my talk, I had friends who were extremely kind. They knew how hard I’d be on myself and promptly sent me messages reminding me of how little it matters, how it wasn’t a big deal and how there were parts of the talk that I managed to salvage. While I can’t say I believe the last part, I am extremely grateful for their kindness and support. I know I’ve already spoken about the importance of a support system and this is where it comes into play. I was really beating myself up and kind words from friends definitely helped me snap out of it.

It’s important to remember that failure is not permanent, as long as we keep trying and give success a chance. I leave you with the final paragraph from my favorite poem, which I recited flawlessly for my 6^th grade English exam.

  “Success is failure turned inside out,

  The silver tint in the clouds of doubt,

  And you never can tell how close you are,

  It might be near, when it seems afar;

  So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit-

  It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit.”