Deliver

The TED talks proved to me that failure is essential in the process towards success. Failure is a mechanism that can be used to reflect on how you can better your process. I think that society and the majority of our early education has conditioned us to believe that failure is permanent and final; and that there are only a finite number to chances granted to us to succeed. Personally, this is why it is hard for me to embrace falling toward failure. We rarely focus on people's failures, only their successes, which leads us to believe that success is usually not preceded by many failures. But in reality, and as proven in "The Unexpected Benefits of Celebrating Failure", to run towards failure to is actually to run towards victory. I think that it is important to chase failure because so many lessons lie within it, including but not limited to, how to overcome adversity, how to use disappointment as motivation, and how to find the value in every experience, no matter the outcome. I think from my own failures I could've learned that, in fact, it is not all-destroying. I can not possibly expect myself to be right the first time all the time, and looking back now, I can see that I have unknowingly used my failures as learning opportunities, utilizing them to better my approach to the same issue the next time I encounter it. How we look at failure can completely shape how we achieve our successes. Failure has the invaluable ability to make you appreciate how rare and how special success can be, and I think that because success has become an expectation in various facets of life nowadays, we have lost sight of just how wonderful a success is. Once we start to implement this into our research, projects, and life experiences themselves, I think that is when we can fully appreciate the value of failure, for it is simply a building block towards success. I admire CAPS' willingness to encourage failure among its students. Research can be extremely difficult and complicated, and I think that because its administrators take the pressure off of its students to achieve perfection, my classmates and I will feel liberated to take risks and be bold in our findings; to question and to explore outside the bounds of what we might have thought possible.