Celebrating Failure

This year has seen quite its number of failures from my part, and I'd like to focus on one of my biggest ones: the loss of my frontside and backside disasters in skateboarding. The disaster is a trick in which you project your board, typically through an ollie (a jump into the air with your skateboard), over the top of a ramp and land with the middle of your board on the coping (the metal bar at the top of a ramp or pool). In high school, I used to be able to do these tricks with ease, but over the course of two years I lost the ability to land it. Over the past few months, I've been relentlessly practicing, with a variety of body slams and scraped knees to accompany it. My biggest failure was hurting my neck, in which I received such bad whiplash after falling that I couldn't turn my neck left or right for a week.

However, I relearned how to do my frontside disasters, and I learned that no matter how many times you get knocked down, in this case very literally, you can do it with practice. My time dedicated to just trying the trick allowed me to excel and once again be able to land it.

This class hasn't necessarily changed my perception of failure, which has always been the same: failing is just a part of success! Failure is inevitable, but only you can dictate just how often it comes into play.