Failure Reflective Essay

I would now like to talk about my most important learnings about failure from this semester and how this has shaped my current understanding of failure. Before this semester started, I never actually considered the idea that failure is looked at differently in different contexts. Our discussions about how failure is looked at in the field of science had a great impact on my overall perception of failure. Almost always, our instant reaction to a failure is negative, and we very rarely try and and extract all the good things that we can take from that failure. Science is a field which has mastered this art of extracting the good from failure. The idea of experimentation itself is very similar to prototyping, where it is okay to fail. In fact, every failure is looked at as a source of more information for becoming better in the future. This again is very similar to Toni Morrison’s idea of looking at failure like it is information.

While I did believe even before this

Now this may seem like a rather unconventional approach to this issue, but it can actually prove to be really useful when analyzing a particular failure. We discussed several different scales and methods of measuring failure, each with its own merits and demerits. What measuring failure can really help with is relatively stacking up each failure with respect to others. Sometimes, you may end up realizing that you have dealt with worse situations, and sometimes you may have to give a particular situation special attention because the failure scale tells you that is higher up than most other failures you have encountered. This form of relativistic analysis does not exist for failure, and based on the factors you consider most important (such as impact of the failure, difficulty of dealing with the failure, etc.), you can construct your own scale for measuring