“The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.”—Gustave Flaubert
Easy success has little value. In my humble opinion, the greater value is in the hardest fought loss or failure. We grow in the learning that comes from failure. (In other words, we don’t learn from the failure itself, but from the opportunity that failure offers to make us a better person.)
I have shared many times the popular saying that “in wrestling, there are no losers, only winners and learners”. I am seeing it in my son as he wrestles as a young freshman in the 170 lb weight class. He has won quite a few easy matches against other freshman wrestlers. He has been pinned by a few far more physically-developed and experienced junior varsity and varsity wrestlers. He has had a few matched in-between where the scale was tipped a bit more toward his opponent, and he has fought to the final whistle and lost. The wins have been far less rewarding than the losses. The losses are teaching him. They are driving him to lift weights to develop his strength and physicality. They are pushing him to practice with more focus.
As an educator, I share a philosophy I learned from a friend and mentor, Dr. Travis Beck. Travis once shared what a Biology professor had taught him—“We never really learn anything until we are first completely confused by it.” In other words, we learn best when we have to struggle to learn it.
It is not popular among many educational professionals these days (I was once chastised that it was damaging to the students’ self-esteem), but I prefer hard exams that students rarely score in the 90s. I like a high-60s/low-70s average that I can curve upwards. I believe that asking students questions to which they know the answer is of little value. Instead, I want to show them what they don’t know and help them learn it.
It is unpopular to challenge students these days. I for one, see the mistake in this. For one, it does not prepare them for the inevitable failings in life. Second, the lack of self-confidence (or sense of false-confidence) is far less disabling than the perceived damage to one’s self-esteem (and, personally, I am one to believe that self-esteem—more specifically, self-efficacy—comes from overcoming more than being told you are okay as you are).
Self-efficacy, after all, is the very sense that one’s ability to accomplish the task at hand—in Flaubert’s words: “the promise of future accomplishments.”
I believe “’Can’t’ never did anything”, but we never know “Can” until we sufficient push (and grow) our limits.
Be your best today; be better tomorrow.
Carpe momento!