Failure isn't always a bad thing by Jackson

Failure isn't always a bad thing by Jackson - April 2016 Scholarship Essay

If there is one major lesson I could teach someone else, espically someone younger than me, is to learn from your mistakes. At some point in life, everyone has experienced a disappointing and stunning failure, these failures can make or break us as humans, and what we learn from them can impact the rest of our lives. For me, failure came my senior year on the football team.

I've played football since sixth grade and committed a lot of my time and effort to becoming better at the sport and understanding the game. In the spring of my junior year, a meeting of the varsity football team was called. During the meeting, Mr. Toles, our athletic director, told us that the school was hiring a coach that would lead us to a winning season for our senior year.

As a senior, that summer I work out five days a week, worked on my football skills, and studied plays on a daily basis from June until the beginning of football practice in August. Even after all this preparation and the daily three-hour practices our team struggled to win only a few games in the season.

Being on a losing team you can see your teammates go from friends to enemies very quickly; although, when your team rallies together to overcome hard times they become closer than brothers. Facing this adversity and failure makes you question whether or not your hard work was worth it and how effective of a leader you are. From this failure I learned to stay positive, the value of success, and how to be a leader in the face of adversity.

The lessons I learned from this experience will help me as I move on to college and as I go throughout life. When I face hardships or difficult decisions, I can think back to the lessons I learned from my senior year playing football.