Failing by Jenny B. '25

I was a high achiever since a young age just because I thought school by itself was really boring. The challenge of winning a bunch of stuff made the whole experience more bearable. But I wasn’t always a perfectionist, not until the past several years.

Perfectionism and high-achiever-ism go hand in hand whenever people discuss either of those topics, but there’s a distinct gap between the philosophies behind them when it comes to how someone confronts failure. The goal of high achievement is to reach a lofty bar that you set for yourself. It’s a challenge.

 

The goal of perfectionism is more similar to a survivalist mindset. If you mess up, you’re screwed, no matter what. Mix that with high achiever tendencies, and that shiny bar you’ve set for yourself becomes the standard for survival, whatever you’re trying to survive against. If you don’t hit that significantly above-average point, you’re so screwed. You’re meat. For whatever reason you’ve made up to justify that.

It’s hard to say with confidence that perfectionism is purely evil, because I do believe there are cases when it can do good. I’m also not implying “high-achieving good, perfectionism bad.”

The thing is, perfectionism is not the only path to success, neither is it the most “valid” path. Perfectionism wants you to believe that though, and it guilt trips you into believing that you settled for mediocrity if you go a different path that is riddled with setbacks and failures. Once you reap the rewards of perfectionism though, it’s hard to break away from it because you no longer feel safe without it and that you’re going to give yourself to catastrophic failure anytime soon.

When I say I experienced a lot of failure in my sophomore year, it’s not a dramatic exaggeration of otherwise satisfactory results. I wasn’t prepared for the amount of shit I was going to eat, sometimes served on a high-speed conveyor belt all at once. I straight-up failed a class in my fall semester that is required for my major, so I had to retake it. I failed not just one exam, but a few exams along the way. I would’ve failed another class, if it wasn’t for the incredibly generous curve.

I wish I could say I was a tough guy. I took that failure really personally. I cried a lot, often in my room or empty classrooms on campus, with people sometimes walking in and then awkwardly shuffling back out. I’ve contemplated several times about running off to a cabin to become a writer (which wouldn’t really solve my problems, but I could dream). “Imposter syndrome” is a common buzzword nowadays, but it’s a good way to describe how I felt. I really couldn’t understand why I was at MIT.

The hardest fact to reconcile with was that I put a lot of time and effort into these, even if the grades told a completely different story. That was the most devastating blow. As if the coursework alone wasn’t hard enough to trudge through, the drop in motivation that followed put a crushing weight on my shoulders. If that was what my full effort looked like, then I didn’t see a point in moving any further. The universe seemed to be telling me that I made the wrong choice and all of the dreams I had were just illusions that were meant to be broken.

The universe is just teaching the same lesson that every organism must endure during their short lives on Earth. “The path to success doesn’t open by eliminating failure. If you want to succeed in the things you want to do, you must learn the art of eating shit and move on.”

I unfortunately haven’t completely learned the art of eating shit, so I’m not going to preach advice to you that I don’t understand myself.

I can say how it’s affected me though. I got a bruised ego, for one. hahahaha

On a lighter note, I’ve also become more sure about what exactly I want to aim for in the near future. Basically, in the face of utter despair, what’s the one thing that keeps me moving?

I wrote back in March that I rediscovered robotics as a potential career path, and conjuring up mental images of robots helped me get through grueling coursework way more effectively than a mental image of a mega-lucrative SWE job that I thought I was supposed to aim for, because every other successful CS major was. I think it would’ve taken me much longer to reach that conclusion if I didn’t endure those failures in sophomore year.

In acknowledging that failure can happen to anybody, it’s also deepened my respect for the people I admire. I used to think, “They’re amazing because they achieved this.” Now I think, “They’re amazing because they achieved this, despite all the shit they had to eat.”

Although I think I’ll still fall back on perfectionist tendencies every so often, I’ve decided that I don’t want to grow up into the kind of person who uses perfectionism to dictate how they lead their lives—whether this is someone whose fear of failure holds them back from what they want to do, or someone who is as unnecessarily stern on the people around them as they are on themselves. I’ve been both kinds of people, and I don’t think either experience was worth it.

Most of all, I don’t want to be like DJ “Suffering from Success” Khaled when he lost his Number One position on the US charts to Tyler, the Creator, and he threw a whole hissy fit about what real music is. I haven’t been That Person before, and I’m going to keep it that way.

As important as it is to try my best at whatever I’m doing, I’m just trying my best to eat shit when it does get served so I can move on and work towards what I want to do, and not to let my disappointment turn me into a bitter tightwad.

By the way, I’m still here. The world didn’t end because I failed.