What Everyone Ought To Know About Failure

Mod Note: Each day we'll be posting the top WSO forum posts of 2014. This one was originally posted on 3/26/14 and ranks #18 for the year by total silver banana count. You can see all our top ranked content here.

I have just recently been given the wonderful opportunity to be a blogging intern for WSO. For my first post I have thought long and hard about what to write as I wanted to start strong. Although I am still a college student, I hope that my story can provide valuable advice to fellow students and even the most experienced professionals.

I want to share what I have learned from my experience with cancer and these last few years after my diagnosis.

During my sophomore year in high school I was diagnosed with Osteosarcoma, an aggressive form of bone cancer. It happened so quickly. One day I was playing tennis, enjoying myself and not having a care in the world, and the next I was beginning my hospitalizations and treatments. I had to withdraw from school and everything else went into the backseat. My chemo treatments lasted for ten months and I had eight surgeries. I spent almost 150 days in the hospital. Because of my treatment plan, I was unable to go out in public. I spent more time at the clinic and the hospital than I did at home. Every holiday and birthday was spent in the hospital. It was a very difficult year.

Although I hope all of you will never experience hardships like this in your life, you will all experience inconveniences, setbacks, deaths, and other difficult failures. At times these events are often very difficult. Even to this day things happen to me that get me down. However, since my treatments I have realized that setbacks happens to everyone, even the richest and the most powerful.The important thing is how you deal with your difficulties and what you learn from them. This is what makes you stronger, more resilient, and more grateful. Being hopelessly negative never helped me and it won’t help you. If you can push through the difficult times, and stay positive, in the long run, the odds are in your favor.

I want to tell you a story to illustrate what I mean, I actually stole it from someone else who posted it on here a few weeks ago. It’s about a man named Peter. What many people probably don't know is that Peter went to Stanford law school. At the time he wanted nothing more than to clerk at the Supreme Court.

For a law student the arguably most prestigious credential you can get is to land a Supreme Court clerkship. After much hard work, he was one of the small handful of clerks who made it to the interview stage with two of the Supreme Court justices. It was all he ever wanted, and it probably consumed his life in a similar way that many fellow college students like myself feel about breaking into Investment Banking, we have all created this obsession with the idea of banking, when in reality we have probably don't know if it's the best thing for us.).

Guess what? He didn’t get it. He failed at something that he had been working all of his life for. He felt dejected.

This is a feeling that many of us have when we don’t succeed at something. Or when we encounter something difficult. We have the same reaction. Feeling of failure, sadness. Peter did not let this get to him for long and he began to continue to work very hard. He reevaluated his career and began working in hedge funds and eventually in the startup world. Peter soon started to experience success and was able to recover from his setback. After a few years he built a business and sold it for a great deal of money. This business was called Paypal, soon after he invested in Facebook, an investment that has made him a billionaire. This mans name is Peter Thiel.

Many years later one of his old friends from law school who had won the clerkship over him and now worked in law said to him

“So, aren’t you glad you didn’t get that Supreme Court clerkship?”

My point in telling you this is not that when you fail, you will become wildly successful like Mr. Thiel. But instead I want to say that, things happen in life that you have no control over, and often at the time seem like the worst thing in the world. The people that are able to succeed are the ones who are the best at handling failure. When we see people like Thiel and Buffet who are madly successful I think we all have a tendency to forget that they share some of the same troubles as we do, they are ordinary people, who learn from failure in an extraordinary way.

 
SouthernAlpha:

Although I hope all of you will never experience hardships like this in your life, you will all experience inconveniences, setbacks, deaths, and other difficult failures. At times these events are often very difficult. Even to this day things happen to me that get me down. However, since my treatments I have realized that setbacks happens to everyone, even the richest and the most powerful.The important thing is how you deal with your difficulties and what you learn from them. This is what makes you stronger, more resilient, and more grateful. Being hopelessly negative never helped me and it won’t help you. If you can push through the difficult times, and stay positive, in the long run, the odds are in your favor.

Well said, +1

 

Excellent post. Wish I had some SBs to toss your way.

I can't even imagine what it must have been like to go through what you did, thank god you made it through to tell the story. What are you currently studying in school?

I had a feeling you were talking about Theil, that's an excellent story. Definitely one of the more inspirational figures (in my mind) in finance and business in general of the last 15-20 years.

Really enjoyed your writing as well. Looking forward to more of your posts.

"When you stop striving for perfection, you might as well be dead."
 

Hey Evan, Thanks for your interest and kind words.

I am currently studying Finance and am interested in eventually working in Investment Banking. I have had an interest in Finance since my sophomore year. Although having cancer sucked at the time, it gave me a ton of free time to learn about finance, during this time I really developed my interest.

I'll be doing another post this sunday, glad you enjoyed this one.

I am a blogging intern at Wall Street Oasis. Feel free to follow me to see my weekly posts.
 

I meant to send a silver banana, but accidentally clicked the other button instead! Is there a way to change that?? My apologies in advance!

 
[Comment removed by mod team]
 

Well written article and great perspective. Thank you so much. There is always much emphasis in business upon coming in first place, being a winner, being the alpha-chimp, and so forth. Here is to the benefits of failure. We walk, we run, we fall, we get up; that's how it works. Fun reading/listening: "The Five Major Benefits of Failure," -Forbes, and "The Upside of Quitting," -Freakonomics Radio. Thanks again!

Slow and steady wins the race.
 

Great article mate. I lost my mom to cancel but it made me realise that she was by far the strongest person in my family for just going through that shit. I mean I've had a tough life but I can never imagine what it would have been like to have been in her shoes. And for you to go through all that at such a young age. Wow good on you.

 

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I am a blogging intern at Wall Street Oasis. Feel free to follow me to see my weekly posts.

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