Failure is a requirement to experiencing a fruitful life—failure in a passion project, failure in academics, failure in the pursuit of a love interest (might be calling some people out here, myself included). You might’ve already heard this idea from that fifteen-second TikTok video you decided to skip because of your ever-deteriorating attention span or because you are a mom seeking advice from a self-help guru who is CEO of six different companies, has a perfect, unwavering “La La Land” kind of relationship with her husband, and has four and a half kids getting their master's at Harvard University because they all single-handedly cured every sickness and disease this world had to offer. We often compare our struggles to others’ seemingly effortless successes, wondering why we can’t be the ones curing diseases or leading multimillion-dollar companies—and it’s easy to feel despondent when the gap between your reality and their perfection feels so insurmountable. But here’s the truth: those successes weren’t effortless. Behind every achievement lies a graveyard of failures.

 

Michael Jordan attributes his success to his 9,000 missed shots, 300 lost games, and 26 missed game-winning attempts. He didn’t succeed in spite of failure—he succeeded because of it. Similarly, Steve Jobs was fired from his own company before returning to make Apple a global powerhouse. Elon Musk faced early struggles with ventures like X.com before revolutionizing industries with Tesla and SpaceX. These figures didn’t achieve greatness by avoiding failure; they embraced it. My favorite author, Mark Manson, puts it best: “Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.” We need to embrace failure and use it as a foundation for growth and action.

 

During our first years in life, we fail a lot. Take a look at toddlers. Just by observing them, the general consensus is that… they’re absolute monsters. It’s like they are programmed to do a set of excruciatingly annoying things: scream, cry, laugh, and rebel. This lack of a moral compass cannot be blamed as it’s primarily due to their inherent innocence and their developing cognition. They learn from their mistakes—that these misdemeanors come at a cost. They can’t draw Spider-Man on the living room wall and walk away. They get punished: no dessert, no TV time, or whatever the case may be. Kids are trained to try to succeed, to avoid failure. As time goes by and kids grow up, they continue to avoid failure. You don’t want to start a new sport as you assume that you’ll be terrible at it. You don’t want to pick up a new hobby as it won’t be as rewarding as performing a hobby you are great at. You don’t want to sing in front of your friends because you’re scared you’ll sound like Fergie at the NBA All-Star game and they’ll bash you for the thousandth time. Our once-foundational belief that failure is bad develops a harmful mentality: that you will never fail at something if you never start. This is detrimental to our society as it is constraining and self-defeating. Every time we reject an opportunity to fail, we deprive ourselves of an opportunity to expand our horizons and develop as humans. We need to develop persistence and wholeheartedly pursue what we truly desire.

 

Failure is essential for growth, much like the process of building muscle in the gym. When you lift weights, your muscles experience microtears. While this might sound counterproductive, it’s actually the key to getting stronger. Your body repairs these tears by rebuilding the muscle fibers, making them thicker and more resilient to handle similar stress in the future. This process is called hypertrophy, and it’s how strength, endurance, and athleticism are developed. The same principle applies to life: by repeatedly exposing ourselves to challenges and "failing" in the moment, we grow stronger and better equipped to face future obstacles. Without these deliberate attempts—and the resulting failures—we stagnate, unable to adapt or improve.

 

I am speaking on this subject as an experienced failure. I do not intend to disregard or undermine the negative emotions felt from experiencing failure but rather use this as a call to action to always pursue opportunities in spite of them. Life is a series of trial and error, yet many choose to avoid the former to prevent the latter. But the fear of rejection pales in comparison to the pain of regret. Be willing to fail in the name of growth—and hold on to the hope that, when we finally achieve the success we’ve longed for, we’ll look back at our failures not as things that defined us, but as the very things that shaped us.