#Fail

I took piano lessons for many many years (eleven, but who's counting?). Each year, I performed in four recitals for a mixed-bag audience of friends, family, and strangers. Between an Indian mother and a Russian piano teacher, to say the weeks leading up to each recital were excruciatingly stressful would be an understatement. I still remember one particular recital as if it happened yesterday. I was off to a beautiful start, mind lost in music, fingers flying across the keyboard, unfazed by the pairs of eyes and ears assessing me. And then something unfortunate happened. My mind drifted for a split second. And in that split second, everything unraveled. My fingers started slowing down then stopped. I attempted to brush it off as if nothing had happened but could only produce dissonant chords and a rather unmelodious melody.

From the corner of my eye, I noticed my piano teacher's head buried in her hands. I was trembling. My lips were quivering. I wanted to disappear. This is it. My piano career is over. She's going to disown me as a student. I thought to myself. I managed to create some sort of ending, stood up, took my bow, and to the chorus of a pathetic yet sympathetic applause, left the recital hall. 

In class a week later, I sat next to my teacher as she entered my recital grade, an ominous letter "F" in my notebook. It was very deliberate and took what seemed like an eternity. The feeling of failure soaked in as my teacher retraced each line of the letter over and over. This resulted in not only an image that terrorized the specific page on which it was written, but an engraving that haunted the blank pages to come. It made it so that my failure would not be forgotten any time soon.

At that point in my life, the experience felt like an irrevocable failure. After all, I had failed my teacher. Failed my parents. Failed in front of everyone. Failed myself. It was a deeply upsetting feeling. But thinking back, the fact that I didn't quit, the fact that this experience only inspired me to practice more and try again four months later, makes me feel like perhaps this was not failure, per se, but a necessary learning experience. 

Unless you've spent the past couple years living under a rock, you've probably noticed a widespread explosion of the word "fail." The word is an internet meme, for crying out loud. But I think it's safe to say that increased use of the word is not at all related to increased experience of failure. Instead the power of the word has simply begun to diminish (of course, context still plays a significant role). From "epic fails" to failblogs, this word which once had grave consequences is now veiled by humor and hilarity. It's a digestible euphemism for that daunting and unpleasant concept of failure. I would even venture to guess that in some ways, the way we now use this word is starting to affect the way we think about, or at least experience, failure itself (to a psycholinguist, probably the most controversial statement I've ever made in this blog).

Recently, my manager mentioned to our team that when it comes to his "failures" he feels that he has never failed, but only learned. To me, it's this exact mindset, not the absence of failure, that cultivates success.

Today, unlike the "olden times," failure is less and less about being shamed by your family or banished from a kingdom and more about dissecting and reflecting on a failure to ensure that it is not repeated. Increasingly, the only failure is in how you deal with an outcome that is not ideal. 

From analysis to early videos to anecdotes to quotes, Steve Jobs' resignation announcement has spawned a flurry of reinvigorated fanaticism for him and his company. As someone who is taking the first steps in my career journey, one statement I found to be particularly meaningful was Jobs' musing that being fired from Apple was one of the best things that has happened to him. "The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." 

I recently watched this TED talk in which Alain de Botton explains his philosophy of success (and by association, failure). He begins by defining our meritocratic society today -- one where success and failure are thought to be deserved. Those who work hard rise to the top. Those who don't end up at the bottom. And because we no longer worship some superhuman force or spirit and instead worship human heros deemed successful by society, we as individuals strive to be successful in the eyes of others. Society. Worst of all, we take failure as a personal blow. Something we have deserved. The end of the world. Botton offers that the key is to identify what you deem to be successful for yourself and to commit to getting there. Expect to fail along the way. Hope to fail along the way. If you ask me, these points of supposed "failure" are the ones that allow you to reflect and reevaluate. To confirm that you still want what you are working towards. Then stand up, dust yourself off, and keep going. Most importantly, don't take failure personally. Sometimes, it's just out of your control.

Finding out that I had been rejected from my dream college was like having someone punch me in the stomach. I felt the walls of my world closing in on me. The place I had for so long identified to be my successful future now, no longer was. What did I do to deserve this? I wondered indignantly as tears streamed down my face. I'm such a failure. How am I going to tell my parents? How am I going to tell my friends? 

It was at that junction that my idea of success required redefining. I realized that "Yale University" should never have been my definition of success. That the way I would be perceived by others should never have been a consideration. And only a year into my time at Penn did I realize Wow, this worked out so well. I am growing and thriving as a person. Being rejected by Yale was not a failure of my own. And clearly, I didn't even know what success was until after I had experienced it. 

If you ask me, society's obsession with categorizing events, actions, and beliefs as "success" or "failure" is the fundamental problem. Because this obsession pervades the way we assess our individual lives, even when the categories are unfitting. The truth is, sometimes failure isn't failure and success is not visible to the naked eye. Resist the urge to mold your life into success versus failure, and instead, just experience. Live. Get lost in the music while working towards everything you want to accomplish. And as long as you accept that sometimes you'll need a chord change to keep the music alive, your fingers will never stop flying and you will never fail.