Editor's Note
Failure is the Key to Success
Robert Proudfoot
Issue date: 8/20/05 Section: editor's picks
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Versus Magazine Online [Image based format]
I would characterize my experience at Vanderbilt as three (going on four) years of continuous failure. Like most of you, I started with high hopes about my college career. My life revolved around having everything slip perfectly into alignment on Vanderbilt's campus. I would find a major that I would passionately enjoy. I would fall in love with the "Perfect Girl" (you know, the one that's amazingly beautiful and intelligent that falls for dorky guys). I would finally become The Man On Campus. I envisioned spending weekends going to the wildest, craziest parties in the world. These would be the best year's of my life. I have failed at all of this and it is this failure that has fueled my growth into adulthood.
At what point do children wake with full knowledge that they have changed, that they have become an adult? When does a person know to stop goofing around so that they can be serious, for real? What is the fine line between youth and maturation into monotone adulthood? At what point of time does hope for a better job, better lover, better religion, better friends fade away? When does one stop trying? Throughout college, I have wrestled with these questions and I would suspect that you will too.
College is the last prescribed checkpoint on the road to success. After four years of undergraduate school, there honestly is no clear path to success. Some think it lies in graduate school, most think it lies in med school. But for what greater purpose are you driving yourself toward to these socially acceptable goals? Sure your father will be pleased when you graduate from med school and your mother will cry openly at your picture perfect wedding, but is that it? Is that the final goal? Are we just a bunch of pink mammals that eat, procreate and excrete in a more complex form?
If the goal is the bourgeois upper crust of society, then so be it. Your path is laid out before you. Remember to kiss ass, make good grades in classes you hate and marry into wealth. But for those of you that have this yearning, this desire, for something greater, something better than corporate America, I ask all of you to fail.