success and failure.

When I was 12 years old, I shook Ben Carson’s hand. This was significant because I wanted to be a neurosurgeon. But maybe more than anything, I just wanted to help people—I was twelve! I memorized the human circulatory system and got A’s on all my science essays when I was in 6th grade. Way before I fully grasped the concept of sticking electric sticks into people’s skulls to fix a confused nerve.
But when I was in high school, I found out you had to take really hard classes and go to school for the rest of your life to be a neurosurgeon. That seemed like a pretty big commitment and something I could easily screw up. So I divorced myself from that idea and I study International Communications now.
There’s a lot of room for failure in life. There’s actually an extraordinary amount of things we could fail at- which is why sometimes I feel like I’m standing at the edge of the deep end of a pool filled with all my hopes and dreams wondering, “Where the hell are my floaties?”
Some of us are afraid of failing so much that we never do anything…and then some of us do so much we completely miss the point of what we’re doing, and then it ends up feeling like failure. And sometimes, I want everything to feel like a dream is coming true, full of whimsy and climaxes of hope! I want life to be exponentially more extraordinary than anything I could imagine, and I have BIG moments of BIG inspiration and I think they’re going to carry me through, but then I find that in order for conviction to equal action, there’s a big space in between that needs to be filled with straight up HARD FRICKIN’ WORK. And in life, I have learned that hard frickin’ work, more often than not, is full of wonder in small victories. And you can learn so much from failure- this is how you succeed. And this, in a sort of laaaarge roundabout way, makes me ask myself ‘What would I do if I knew I couldn’t fail?’



I’ve been on a TED Talk binge for the past week; I have to watch a lot of them for my classes. I came across this one by Natalie Warne, who says this:
“Whatever you want, chase after it with everything that you have, not because of the fame or the fortune, but solely because that’s what you believe in, that’s what makes your heart sing, that’s what your dance is. That’s what is going to define our generation, when we start chasing and fighting after the things that we love and that we want to fight for…Find that thing that inspires you that you love, and just chase after it, and fight for that, cause that’s what’s going to change this world and that is what defines us.”
But okay, the point of this is going to be (which I learned in this TED Talk): It’s the little acts that make us extraordinary. The little moments and the hard work that builds up to those big moments, where a bill is passed or you meet Oprah.