Lessons learned from failure by Nathan

Lessons learned from failure by Nathan - February 2017 Scholarship Essay

    Failure is a part of life. In life failure isn’t measured in amounts, but rather how you learn from failure. Failure is inevitable and it’s needed for future success. No failure has ever taught me as much as the one a couple years ago. The day finally came and it was the moment we had been preparing for the whole week. The amount of vigorous work we put in for this one game was unfathomable. We were preparing for a final four basketball game and we were ready.  Well we thought we were ready. It is said that “hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work” but I don’t know what beats working hard because that along with our talent wasn’t enough. We failed. I failed. Eaglecrest 5A Varsity boys basketball team was the favorite to beat 5A Thunder Ridge in the Final 4 semifinal game at University of Colorado, Boulder. But we fell short. However, it’s only had beneficial outcomes today. Not only has our team gotten better but it’s also had positive effects on us, and it’s made me a better person.
    Learning from failure hasn’t always been easy for me. I always wanted to be good, to be the best, but who doesn’t. I hadn’t realized that to do this you must fail first. Then learn how to bounce back. All of the best teams lose at some point. Nearly every team to win a championship has lost at some point and if they hadn’t they surely faced adversity. Going into that game we faced our fair share of adversity, but for the most part we didn’t lose. We were supposed to win. That’s the mentality we had and we carried it into the game and we did come out victorious. But in the back of our minds the returning players knew if we learned from that then we would be much better.
    The next year dawned upon us along with a new mindset. We were forced to have different mindset because we weren’t regarded as the heavy favorites we had been the year before. We responded to the criticism and past failures and we turned them into success. We won the Final Four game and went on to the 5A State Championship game against the number one team in the state. The ability for us to do this allowed me to not only grow as a teammate but also a person. The lesson of taking the positive outcomes of failure and using them to my benefit will be an ability I hope to possess for the rest of my life.