Recently, I failed a final exam. Nope! You heard right. A final exam. Looking back, I am completely puzzled by exactly how it happened. It may have been trouble with time management and prioritizing. It may have been bad luck or my lack of preparation. Either way, I sure felt I was dead when my teacher told us our time was up. I had completed just a little over fifty percent of the exam. What really put me in a depressing mood was that this was in addition to two previous quizzes and one chemistry test that I failed.

Like many students who grew up getting good grades in school, this was a bit devastating. Even many students who do not take school too seriously may feel a little worried about having to retake a course. However, failure like this once in awhile is actually beneficial to anybody. People need failure in their lives. Without failure, people become unmotivated. Failure may also lead a “useless” person onto the right path. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, was a Harvard dropout and a co-owner of a failed business called Traf-O-Data. Albert Einstein, a twentieth-century well-known physicist and the developer of the General Relativity theory, did not learn how to speak fluently until he was nine years old and was rejected from Zurich Polytechnic School. Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba Group and the wealthiest man in mainland China (excluding Hong Kong), was literally rejected from Harvard ten times and turned away from 30 jobs he applied for. Another great example would be Oprah Winfrey who was deemed “too emotional” by her boss. What these successful people all have in common is that they were able to channel the negativity associated with failure into energy that motivates them to persevere.

In the case of failing exams, feeling stressed and downcast is natural, but students should not dwell on their grades. Instead, they can focus on solutions whether that can be talking with their teachers for alternatives or studying smarter. Channeling the negativity onto solutions instead of past problems encourages positivity and emotional well-being.

After failing numerous exams and quizzes, I felt a sense of renewal. Failing this many tests and quizzes for the first time in my life brought me new perspectives. It allowed me to peer into the feelings struggling students frequently experience. It allowed me to understand the feeling of just wanting to pass a class. It made me realize that to genuinely experience and understand life, I need to fail more often. After getting past these multiple failures, I felt more positive about taking risks and life in general. I even regretted that I was too afraid to take risks in the past. I felt more appreciative and admired students who still manage to persevere despite frequently failure in school. Failing taught me how to be less judgemental of others because I finally realized that nothing can be perfect. Most of all, failure taught me that even in terrible situations, there are always opportunities you can grasp.