Why failing doesn't make you a failure
Hi, newsletter readers! Sheeva here. I’m writing this newsletter just after the vernal equinox (March 20), which signifies the beginning of spring.
The vernal equinox is also the Persian New Year (Noruz), so Happy Noruz to my fellow Persians (and everyone celebrating Noruz around the world)! To learn more about the history of Noruz, check out this piece I wrote for Persianesque. My MIT classmate, NASA Astronaut Jasmine Moghbeli (who, like me, is Persian-American) celebrated Noruz from the White House. Pretty awesome!
It’s a time for new beginnings and rebirth of nature after the cold winter hibernation feels. I’ve been spending more time outside over the past couple of days and it’s been amazing.
With the vernal equinox, we leave behind the cold winter in favor of nature’s rebirth. I see this as a metaphor for being an entrepreneur. Part of being a small business owner (and human living on Earth) is knowing when to cut your losses, and leaving things behind. Sometimes that means quitting things that no longer serve you and accepting that moving forward is no longer an option.
In May 2021, I blogged about why quitting is good sometimes. I wrote, “Why am I writing an entire essay about quitting things? Because we glorify perseverance, even continuing on a path that you hate, over living a more intentional life. Why don’t we talk more about the times we quit something that was no longer serving us? The reason is that it is scary to live intentionally, difficult to give up when things are not working, daunting to be faced with what might look like failure to others.”
We often set super high standards for ourselves, ideals that we wish to live up to for various reasons - because we think we’ll be happy, because we’ll make others happy, because we don’t consider the insurmountable setbacks we may encounter (how would we know about them without following our goals to the places they lead?).
Sometimes we embark on a path and face challenges or, in the process, discover another path that we like better. That’s happened to me tons of times. As an undergraduate at MIT, I switched majors from chemical engineering to brain and cognitive science my junior year (!) because I was depriving myself of what I really wanted to study to make myself seem smart to people. The truth is that, while I love learning about engineering, I will never be as good an engineer as I am a neuroscientist. The brain is my lifelong love and I can’t ever imagine studying anything more interesting. If anything, two years of engineering courses at MIT helped me better understand the brain as a system, so it’s not like all was lost. Still, it was tough to face the fact that I made Cs and Ds my sophomore year at MIT, digging into ChemE classes, after making straight As all my life. I felt like my previous successes didn’t matter anymore.
I dove into my new life as a neuroscientist enthusiastically, but I faced failure again in graduate school when I was pursuing my PhD. More than five years into my studies, I was a PhD candidate preparing to write my thesis. Actually, I attended a thesis bootcamp and wrote the first part. Sometime in spring 2013, something changed, and I was offered the choice to leave with a Master’s. I had heard horror stories of PhDs working on their degree for even 10 years, leaving without anything to show for it, so I accepted wholeheartedly. Still, I felt sad about the loss of identity I experienced - I was an MIT graduate, after all, and people told me all sorts of doors would open for me after I got my degree. I was determined to right my wrongs, so I applied to graduate schools so much in the following years that one program banned me from applying ever again.
Sometimes, you are just not successful at what you set out to do, and that’s okay. Failing doesn’t make you a failure.
Does it hurt to not fulfill your dreams? Yes, it feels terrible. Would it be just as bad to continue on a path of most resistance in a single-minded pursuit of goals that were not cut out for me? I assume so, but I’ve never done it. Life is multifaceted and even if I fail in my career goals, there are other aspects of life: friends, family, hobbies, volunteering, and so on. Sure, I might not be the best at [esoteric academic subject here], but I can bake a mean pie to elevate a gathering of friends, or channel my fleeting and often difficult-to-wrangle thoughts into a blog, and those things are worth something, too.
From my failure as a PhD student, I learned that academia is not set up for the success of the people in it. After 10 years of reflection on my failed PhD experience, I’ve decided it’s time to start the discussion on failing to complete your PhD. Why? It’s because, for years, I thought I was alone in my terrible PhD experience, until I met a science writing colleague with the exact same experience as me. I went several years thinking I was the only person who had had the experience I did; yet, I was wrong.
These days, I know that it’s not all that uncommon to get dropped from one’s PhD program. The fact that nobody’s talking about it means that nothing is being done about it. That’s why I hope to talk more about people’s failed PhD experiences more on the Fancy Comma blog in upcoming weeks (subscribe to our blog so you don’t miss out!).
That’s not to say that science itself doesn’t involve failure: far from it. I recall one story from a professor at my grad school. He worked on a drug for decades, getting it through the initial stages of drug testing to get FDA approval, only to see it fail at the end stage (I assume Phase 3) of clinical trials. How does one live with that type of devastating defeat?
It can be really soul-crushing to think about failure, but maybe it’s good to reflect, and see what lessons one can learn from it. Still, I don’t like thinking about all the times I put in 100% to do something, only to watch it all fall apart. Honestly, it makes me feel like a failure myself. Yet over the years, I’ve learned that just because you fail at things doesn’t make you a failure.
Want to know something amazing? Failure can make you more successful. It can teach you lessons about life and the world that you can use in your next endeavor. Most entrepreneurs, for example, fail at their business ventures before they succeed. I guess they do this so much that Entrepreneur magazine has an article titled “Want to Be a Successful Entrepreneur? Fail.”
So, next time you think about your failures, remember that they don’t make you a failure. They teach you important life lessons and help you realign your life course. You get to choose, more intentionally, what things you want to keep in your life and which things you want to move past; think of it as spring cleaning. Jenni Gritters writes about this kind of stuff a lot in her newsletter (subscribe!): I love her recent issue about navigating life’s complexity and constraints while relentlessly pursuing your life goals.
What do you have to say about lessons failure has taught you? Feel free to reply to this email (for email subscribers) or comment below (for Substack visitors). Your responses may be included in the next newsletter!
Links from around the web (what we’ve been reading and writing):
Fancy Comma launched a free resource for anyone seeking to improve their digital marketing, science communication, writing, or other skills. Check it out.
On the Fancy Comma blog, we’ve been talking about evergreen content, discussing white paper types, answering your questions about science copywriting, and reviewing Jamie Zvirzdin’s new book, Subatomic Writing.
I’ve been working on writing up my manuscripts from my graduate school work and Kaycie Butler’s tweets have been super helpful! Follow her @ButlerKaycie on Twitter or visit her on the web at butlerscicomm.com.
Comparing the branding between Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts, Tamsen Webster asks, “What are the ties that bind us to brands?”
Science journalist and freelance coach Wudan Yan writes about humanizing reporting in her newsletter.
That’s all for this week’s newsletter! If you liked what we had to say, please share our newsletter!