Everything in life is how we look at it.
I remember reading some statistic that life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we react to it. I think this is a definite truism.
And it is our earliest experiences that will always have the strongest pulls on our beliefs, expectations and reactions.
This is why I love teaching younger children. We all had those teachers growing up who managed to make us believe that nothing we ever did was going to be right. We also probably had those other teachers who never seemed to care whether we succeeded or failed. But maybe, hopefully, we also had that one teacher – more than one if we were really lucky – who showed us that through systematic and persistent efforts, we could accomplish anything we put our minds towards.
Bless the boy who missed out on having this teacher. It’s hard to keep trusting people – including ourselves – once they’ve let us down, it’s hard to keep believing when our beliefs have been challenged, it’s hard to convince yourself that “this time will be different” when you’ve experienced the same (sometimes destructive) patterns multiple occasions before.
They say that failure is character building. It can also be character destroying, if not balanced with the hope of overcoming it in the future.
Which is where “self fulfilling prophecies” march in: if a child believes he can do nothing other than fail, his expectations, actions and behaviors will reflect this. Why behave if he’s just going to get blamed for others misbehavior anyway? Why try if he’s just going to fail? Why care if it’s just going to lead to disappointment?
And yet, no matter how many times a pattern repeats itself, nor how many times we convince ourselves that “we we right” about a projected outcome, life will always continue to surprise us. Circumstances never truly repeat themselves; there may always be some unexpected variable to step in at the last second to scramble the equation.
And this is why our most tried and believed scientific theories are still just that: theories!. As many times as we’ve observed the sun rise in the East and set in the West, there could still be some ridiculous unforeseen circumstance tomorrow that flips the poles and reverses our planet’s rotation to make our centuries old observation suddenly untrue. Not that it’s likely to happen, but the point is that it could.
Reflecting on all this, it’s not good for a person to always fail. It gives a false sense of “why even bother?” However, it also isn’t good for a person to always succeed. This can lead to a false sense of infallibility and, well, really obnoxiously entitled behavior. When I hear people talk about the “everybody gets a trophy generation” and then I watch twelve year olds talk down to grad school student/baristas making the $5 frappuccinos their parent’s credit card is paying for, I realize that, as a society, we’re failing to properly guide our next generation into being kind, understanding or empathetic members.
So what can we do?
At the moment I’m leaning towards a temporary change in vocabulary: call it lessons and celebrations. Lessons are those experiences from which we learn to do better, try harder or prepare more fully next time. Celebrations are instances where we can sit back for a moment and reflect on a job well done.
It’s not a full dismissal of the success/failure model, but a slight perspective change to overcome the inherent issues the model presents.
In a society focused on “he who has the most toys wins,” it’s hard to not feel that immediate gratification indicates “success.”. With social media standing as a constant reminder of other people’s “successes,” new jobs, new cars, happy relationships, children’s accomplishments, etc., if we don’t have something to “feed into the beast” for that moment, we run the risk of feeling the opposite of “successful.”. Nothing is technically happening but we’re reacting to it as if it is.
I maintain that one of the best lessons we can learn in early childhood is that success should come from within and it is our own efforts that can encourage it. Yes, lots of successes are actually a reflection on the luck of your circumstances: castings are often affected by who else you’re up against, audience reactions are usually affected by the other things happening in the world around your project, awards are influenced by the other candidates and judges’ subjective opinions. But if you keep working diligently, specifically and systematically in a particular direction, you’ll get farther than hoping that the conditions will finally become what you need to succeed.
Again, it’s all in how we look at it.
Erika Diane 