One of the biggest fails I had this semester has to do with my textbooks for my classes. I always like to plan, and as soon as the syllabus is released, I always try to beat all my classmates and get the textbooks before they sell out. Well, this backfired for me this semester. I am traveling quite a bit and spend the majority of my time in Vienna, Austria. As all the syllabus became available at the beginning of the semester, I ordered my books and sent them to Florida. I don't know what I was thinking, as I wouldn't be in Florida for another two months and didn't know if they would even send them back.
To make matters worse, I had all my mail forwarded to my parents home while I'm out of the country. So even when I got to Florida (two months later), my books weren't there. I had to wait another two weeks for my parents to drive down and visit me to deliver all my books.
You can imagine it was a rough start to the semester as many assignments, exams, and lectures reference information from the textbook and I hadn't had mine for months. I used this situation to make several friends in my other classes and sometimes even get photos of pages in the book in case there was a graph or other illustrated I needed to see.
The biggest takeaway from this was to pay closer attention to the detail. Doing things as quickly as possible is not always the best solution, and if I had taken the time to look at the shipping address, I would have saved myself from 2 and a half months grief.
When tying this into failure, I believe you have to focus on the solution. Problems will always arise, and many times you will not solve things on the first time, but staying positive and being creative will help you figure things out. As a result of this exact dilemma, I found that working with someone on assignments helped me retain the information I was learning even more. I think this is why we do a discussion post in this class. This allows you to gain a different perspective on issues but also to think more in-depth about the issues.
This class has massively changed my perspective on failure as it is typical of entrepreneurs. I have learned to accept failure head on because they are all learning opportunities. The idea of "Failing forward" has been one of the great takeaways I have had from this class.
The rushed nature that our academic lives affords us means that failure is an inevitable state we can only put off for so long. I too am quite guilty of ordering class work materials before short sightedly realizing that half way through the time period of the term that I have never used these materials nor will I be required to do so, so the feeling of a bridge burned is something I can relate to.
ReplyDelete