Thoughts on Failure After Striving Towards a Goal

Jan 09, 2024

This was going to be much different. I was going to write about an experiment where I attempt the direct method of language learning with Latin. I had timed myself first thing in the morning, taken an old Latin reader, become immersed in the language, and written my notes with the hopes of showing how drastic an improvement I had made in a week! This did not happen. It did not work. I failed.

Failure. We all know it. We all hate it.

I see now lack of preparation; my goals being too lofty. I see what I could’ve done instead.

But does failure mean that I should not have strived for the goal? By no means.

Failure is the distinction for the path of high achievement. The striving, whether met with success or failure, is noble itself. Success is the reward of a noble effort.

Theodore Roosevelt in his most famous speech titled, “The Man in the Arena” said this,

The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to achievement…
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.1

Do not choose your actions by what is most likely to succeed, but what is the right thing to do.