Fail Forward
In sharing her college experiences with undergraduate students, Dr. Jennifer Bott, WMU Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, speaks of the enormous power to be found in failure, especially when one learns from it. Knowing Dr. Bott’s accomplishments, it is hard to think that she has failed at anything in her life, but then this accomplished, successful, and confident woman shares how she failed her first semester in college, what that meant to her, and why failure was essential to her later success.
At the end of that first semester of her freshman year, she was on her way to losing her scholarship because of low grades. Until that point, she had everything planned out: she was going to be a journalist, cover wars around the world, and bring those stories back to America. However, during her freshman year she forgot how important work was to earning that opportunity, and at the beginning of her sophomore year she felt completely lost. She had no idea what she was going to be. She had failed very visibly at a big goal she had, and she had to pick herself up and find the thing she could become, because her former goal, the thing that she had wanted, now seemed unlikely. In her second semester she had taken a class in industrial psychology. At the time, she didn’t know exactly what "industrial" psychology was. But she soon found it fascinating. And it was on the day she registered for this class that she found her future. But first she had to pick herself up, "fail forward" as she learned what it meant to be a great student, falter, and find her way.
Dr. Bott eventually succeeded academically in everything that came after that, but first she had to figure out what failure meant, how failure sat in her heart, and how failure did not define her life; it only defined a period. She advises students thus: "I encourage you to embrace failure, because if you remain safe in the spaces in which you succeed, you may never know the thing waiting on the other side of that failure. And the failure might not be as epic as mine; it may be taking a class that you are interested in but you are not sure you are going to be very good at, or maybe it is joining a club or volunteering in a place you like but are afraid of. It’s taking the step that scares you and building the resilience to stay in that space and make it your comfort zone." The experience of failing, of being lost and finding herself, helps Dr. Bott every day, both in her personal life and in the big tasks she needs to accomplish to move WMU forward.
True leaders understand the importance of making mistakes and learning from them. Failure is a significant part of creating who we are. It is the other side of our success. So while in college, don’t be afraid to take risks so you can grow and find your place in this world; it is not a step backward, nor is it bad or something to fear. Instead, it’s an excellent stepping stone to become fully yourself. There is power in failure!
"You always pass failure on your way to success." — Mickey Rooney