Dream big and dare to fail

By Farezza Rashid

For the good of the society, for a country to prosper, and for a better community, education always comes first but what about the individual? We are all different from one another; some were born to be lawyers, some were born to be lawyers but do not want to be, while some were born to be hippies but are forced to be lawyers. Whichever path we take, battered or untraveled; one thing should be kept in mind, which is to live.

The importance of education is uncontested. It is impossible to live without but a wise man once said, “All work and no play makes Jack or in our Malaysian context, Ah Chong or Dollah or Muthu a dull boy” and I am sure this applies to the girls as well. The pressure of obtaining straight A’s and high CGPA’s have turned many students into zombies; filling every waking hour with studies, no fun, no exercise and sometimes even canceling out food.

For them, getting a B is not an option because a B could cause unemployment. What use, however, is stressing over a perfect CGPA if at the end of the day you suffer from a heart disease, digestive problems, sleep problems, obesity, depression, autoimmune diseases and even skin conditions such as eczema (Understanding Stress: Signs, Symptoms, Causes and Effects). You would not be able to enjoy your high end jobs and humongous salaries because they are all spent on doctors anyway.

And then there is the pressure from the people around us - parents, relatives, neighbors and the ’system’. Dreading family gatherings during festive holidays went back all the way to primary school. Sitting at the dining table, I was smothered with, “How many A’s did you get?” “Where do you plan to go (after primary school!)?” and “Oh, Yana was first in her class again!”

Tormented, I wanted to scream, “Happy holidays, everyone!” And parents, having friends with children the same age always feel it is a competition comparing their own to others’, like playing a game of cards; the parent with the best card, or in this case a child, wins the game. Of course, students may shove their relatives under the rug but they would never want to let their parents down, therefore willing or not, they enter that game of cards.

Not to mention the higher people in the ‘system‘, using students as fertilizers for percentages, rankings, reputations and even marketing. Thus, the pressure builds up. Students feel like they have to get an A for every subject, they have to make it to the Dean’s List; therefore they have to give up everything else that life has to offer to achieve, well at least try.

My personal experience, studying hard is not the way but studying smart is. Studying hard is cramming every single word and punctuation mark in the text book and not giving yourself a break, while studying smart is knowing what to study, when to study and living your life along the way.

Through Facebook and Twitter, students and even under graduates rant publicly about CGPA’s and how they think their parents would ‘kill’ them if they didn’t graduate with First Class Honors. This in turn makes some seven hundred plus contacts in their friends list also unnecessarily nervous. It’s good to set a high standard for yourself, it shows how determined you are, but is it really worth going insane over?

Please do not misinterpret; this article is not to encourage failure or saying that one should fail. Or hey, maybe one should fail once or twice, and feel for his/herself that it’s not the end of the world… yet.

In How Failure Breeds Success, an article in Businessweek published in July 2006, quoted Stefan H. Thomke, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of Experimentation Matters as saying, “Failure is not a bad thing.”

He further reiterates that failure is not only important but crucial, especially in the world of business where breakthrough innovations are constantly sought after. This particular article stressed the point home that although everyone fears failure, breakthroughs depend on it and the best companies embrace their mistakes and learns from them. So, if multimillion-dollar companies can fail, why can’t students, who are still at an early stage?

Many great and successful people who are now famous have tasted failures before they achieved success. Legendary names such as star athletes Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan, Van Gogh and even Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken, had all gone through failures and rejection but have raised above it all to be where they are today.

Do not be afraid to fall. If you do, just pick yourself up, dust yourself off and come back a stronger person because failure is the best teacher. Strive for excellence based on the lessons learnt from that failure. Make your life an adventure by not learning everything the easy way because through the hard way, you will be able to learn more as well as gain self confidence and street-smartness when you come to a life-challenging situation.