Failure. It’s an uncomfortable word, and yet it is one of the most common sources of motivation. Or rather, one’s fear of it. Failure is one of humanity’s most common fears, and it forms the base of many others. The fear of rejection is its most basic, the fear that one has failed to do enough to be accepted by whomever it is that they are scared might reject them. But even in its own form it is multifaceted, depending on the privacy of the failure. The possibility of public failure, before friends or strangers, is more adrenaline-inducing and sharp, but less deeply impactful, than failure before oneself. And yet, it is this second type that we more often face.
Adult life involves making choices and setting goals, and the majority of these are made inside our own heads and never communicated to anyone else. If I made the goal to go to bed early this week, or the choice to put off one assignment to finish another that seems more pressing, it could seem so mundane and uninteresting that I would keep it to myself and tell my friends the more exciting things that happened during the day. This means that when we look back and realize we stayed up until 1 A.M. a few nights this week, or that the assignment we put off is due tomorrow and will be rushed and not as good as it should have been, it feels like total failure. To be fair, it is a failure. However, “total” is too strong a word, because something was gained. Most likely, I made those goals knowing that they were unreachable, that total success was not within grasp. However, they were made for a reason. I saw something in my life or work that I was unhappy with and knew could be better, and I did something about it.
It is common nowadays when speaking of goals, for people to suggest making small, manageable goals, to avoid the dejection and loss of drive that often accompanies failure. This is only the first step. The focus is often on the small goals, and what can be forgotten is the larger goal that must be set in order to give the small order and meaning. When someone talks about exercising for twenty minutes once a week, it is often in the context of gradually increasing the time spent exercising in pursuit of a larger goal, say thirty minutes every day. For most people, the larger goal is, at the time they begin to work towards it, unreachable. And yet they reach for it. Perhaps they end up only exercising every other day, or even twice a week. While they may have failed in respect to the larger goal, they have improved themselves from where they were when they began.
I have some personal experience with completely unreachable goals, although it's more of a shared family goal, rather than individual. Since I was very young, a toddler even, my parents have been trying to reach the highest points in each of the fifty states. Through multiple geological surveys by individual states as well as federal entities including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Geological Survey measured the highest points above sea level in every state and placed round metal markers on them. For the past 20 years or so, any trip that passed through or ended in a new state required research to determine the possibility of fitting a high point into the itinerary, often more than one. In June 2019, my sister graduated from La Sierra University, and my parents decided that we would drive back home rather than fly. We drove north, and went to Zion National Park, Yellowstone National Park, and Mt. Rushmore, firsts for most of the family. But we also did the highpoints of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. These four greatly varied in difficulty. We were able to drive up to the Kansas and Nebraska high points, but White Butte in North Dakota was about a three-mile hike, and Black Elk Peak in South Dakota was about seven and a half. These are not unusually long hikes for us, as most of our family vacations involved national parks. However, they pale in comparison to those peaks that make this goal unreachable for my parents. Denali, in Denali National Park in Alaska, stands more than 20,000 feet above sea level, and is the highest point in North America. Mt. Rainier, the highest point in the state of Washington, is more than 14,000 feet above sea level, and the National Park Service says that “Conditioning climbs on similar glaciated peaks, and participation in mountaineering schools are essential” before attempting to scale the mountain. A significant difference from a seven-and-a-half-mile hike on well-maintained trails.
Despite the fact that my parents will never be able to summit Denali or Mt. Rainier, they have attempted to complete their goal as best they can. They have passed on their goal to me and my siblings, and in their attempt, instilled in us a love of nature and national parks. On the base level, they have failed, but in trying, they have improved themselves and those around them in many other ways. This view requires a paradigm shift away from our binary views on success and failure, and towards a more nuanced, tiered understanding of success. The inability to complete every aspect of a goal does not necessarily signify failure, but could, if we try, be understood as another kind of success, even if it was not what we set out to do.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.