Hey, my name is Paris Mitton. I’m 19 years old and a software engineer. Just a few months ago, I was very certain I would not be a software engineer within the decade – I was my school’s valedictorian, had perfect grades, and applications out to the most prestigious universities in America. What happened next was a complete disaster. I had to struggle to figure out, with weeks until graduation, how to go from almost 0 job experience to a software engineer. I suggest you read the story of what happened and how I got here before you read the rest of this post.
Dealing with failure is hard. Really hard. If we always learned from our mistakes, we’d have life figured out by retirement age, and very few of us will ever have life figured out, period. We’ve built all these little lessons and sayings in our culture about failure and how to handle it, but we do a really bad job applying any of it. Many of us ignore it when we encounter it, and we do nothing to actually expose our kids to what failure is in the real world. I found that out the hard way.
When I finally landed at FullContact, there was definitely a sigh of relief. I was exactly where I wanted to be, doing exactly what I wanted to do. But in exchange, the stress in the months between my graduation and my employment has doubtlessly shortened my lifespan. What happened was clearly a failure on a lot of levels – one that ended up being positive, but never the less, a gigantic mess and learning experience. I want to share some of what I learned in a way that I hope is fairly universal (although the rant for soon-to-be college students is coming, have no doubt).
Never play the victim.
This isn’t new information. Nobody suggests that you should play the victim. But neither do we spend enough time talking about how victimizing yourself isn’t just obnoxious, it will poison your life. It is too easy to be a victim, and too easy to stay a victim.
I don’t blame people for wanting to offload blame. Coming out of high school as valedictorian but no college prospects, it’s very easy to find somebody else at fault. It was my parents for leaving me uninformed. It was my counselor for letting me go without a safety school. It was the colleges for ignoring my talent and feeding lies about their acceptance criteria and costs to kids. No, it was society for believing so blindly in a broken system! I went along like this, going from fault to fault, for quite a while because it’s a pretty comfy place to be. You get to keep all of your self-worth even if the world thinks otherwise.
My peers did this too. The rest of my graduating class had similar luck getting into prestigious colleges, and many had the same complaint: “Well, I was white and middle class. Of course I couldn’t get in. Of course I couldn’t get any scholarships. It’s affirmative action at it again.” I was in an advanced program where everyone had immense social pressure to excel academically, so there’s a huge incentive to save face with a statement like this. Now, you can blame your failure on outside circumstances. It wasn’t me. It’s not my fault.
If you’re busy being the victim, you can’t learn from the experience. When you shift the blame of a situation onto somebody else, it’s usually a way to avoid introspection. Since you obviously weren’t the source of the problem, you don’t have to change. So you don’t, and the problem gets ignored, and nothing really gets done. Maybe the Stanford admissions did make a mistake. Maybe it was just bad luck that you didn’t get in. The reality is, it doesn’t matter whose fault it is. In most cases, there is something you can do better in a bad situation. And if there isn’t, then stop getting caught up trying finding a scapegoat. Every bad situation is an opportunity for self improvement, and if you’re the victim, you’re ignoring that opportunity. Placing blame is embracing your weaknesses and giving control of your life away. It affirms, “Circumstances outside of my control have put in this situation because I’m too weak. My force of will is not enough to change my life.” Well, blame it on the web, but the spider’s your problem now. If I could go back, I would tell my classmates, you are where you are. It doesn’t matter why. What are you going to do now?
But the most dangerous part of this way of thinking is how quickly it becomes a habit. Playing the victim can become a very addictive role. The human brain has a multitude of filters and tricks to keep itself from feeling vulnerable, and the majority of them are subconscious. Your mind feels safer knowing that it doesn’t have to change than it does realizing that you could have done better. Working against this takes directed and clear effort, and without it, the downward spiral is all too clear.
First, you say that the university didn’t accept you because you’re white. You didn’t get in, nothing you can do now, right? So you get mad, don’t get excited about education, get cynical about the whole process, and have generally a bad time. Your brain has no problem twisting the situation until it fits the narrative that you started – that this situation is not your fault. And now you wonder who else is screwing you, the banks, the corporations, the democrats, the republicans. It’s not just the boogeyman, it’s all the little things too. Didn’t get the girl? Well, she was blind to your charms. Came in late to work? It’s that idiot bus driver. You ignore all the places you can do better and all the ways you can control your life in favor of feeling mentally comfortable. Or worse yet, maybe you give up in a self-righteous rage. People like this aren’t pleasant to be around, and don’t end up being very happy.
Perhaps it was this realization, or maybe just the frantic pressure to do something with my life now that college was off the table, that allowed me to get past who was screwing me this time and focus on what I could do now. Learning from this failure enabled me to develop a plan, move forward, and figure out a new way to get to where I wanted.
Failure is good — and nobody knows it.
Failure as a positive thing is popular entrepreneurship canon — fail fast, fail often, learn, and repeat. But in the wider spectrum of the world, “failure” is treated exclusively as a negative word. In high school, “failing” is the worst thing a kid can do. In fact, the whole concept of failure is tremendously alien to students.
We have this strange “everyone gets a blue ribbon” mentality in our elementary, middle, and even high schools. Like I mentioned earlier, we go out of our way to protect our egos. We know how bad it feels to realize you aren’t good enough, so we give all our kids the blue ribbon, tell them that they’re special, and praise everything they do. We think we’re protecting them from pain when really we are guaranteeing it later on. Of course we have a tendency to blame people when we actually start failing — everyone in our little kid life up until now has told us it’s never our fault! We have a direct hand in building these fragile, probably misguided egos in our children when really they should get shoved around a lot. An immune system that endures attacks from all sides is ultimately a healthier one, and our ego is a mental immune system. (Ironic that parents hate it when their kids get dirty or sick, for the exact same reason — they think they’re protecting them from illness when really they’re guaranteeing no immunity later on.) We’re so scared to tell kids “you’ve screwed up” that when it happens they don’t know how to react.
Then, when kids make the transition to high school, they go from one warped vision of the failure to another. Failure in the microcosmic academic life is nothing like failure in the real world. In school, the whole world is pass/fail. All you get is one shot on the test, or the class. Either you make it or you don’t, and it’s hard to identify what helped get you there. In the real world, failure is not so binary. It is usually a sliding value, ranging from “mostly success” to “pretty much failed”. There’s salvageable bits and pieces.
Additionally, academic consequences aren’t material. What’s does an F in the class mean in the long run? Anything at all? You can bet a startup CEO is trying to learn all he can from his experience because his livelihood is at stake. For kids who aren’t engaged, what’s the problem with a few bad grades?
Then, college admissions is the biggest mess of them all. Most college-minded kids spend their entire 4 years in high school fretting about the results of a single application. The process doesn’t feel like a series of incremental steps contributing to the overall success of the application. There are two results, yes and no, and a good degree of randomness about which will actually happen. For many kids this will be the one big “try” they will make in their school life, and it doesn’t teach them enough. Trying your hardest, and being told “no” by a college for no clear reason doesn’t do much to help you handle high-pressure, long-term investments like the college admissions process. When the vast majority of kids this year are told “no,” what are they supposed to think? Was it the essays? The grades? What could I do better? You’ll have to figure that out yourself, because the rejection letter sure isn’t telling you.
So we as a society never really expose students to the complex failure-ish of the real world. Students should spend their teenage years learning from their mistakes, and we’ve equipped them very poorly to do that. I certainly wasn’t confident. I remember thinking early in my Junior year that “if I don’t get into these colleges, this is going to be the first time I’ll have ever failed. Like, really failed.”
I don’t want to brag. I recognize there are a lot of kids who struggle seriously through their high school years and do fail, often. But among a class of kids who take their academics far too seriously, I think I’m not alone in having never truly been defeated. In my myopic world view, there was nothing I thought I couldn’t do. I had aced all my academics. Every hobby I’ve had I’ve gotten good at. I Impressed every teacher and every friend. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes — but I’d never had to admit defeat. Putting your all into applying for college, and not getting accepted: that’s defeat. People say “learn from your mistakes” but when I’m sitting with nothing after high school, it’s hard to put that in perspective. You’ve failed, Paris. You screwed up. That’s a weird feeling. I got stopped right at the gate, when I was just trying to start my life.
In fact, it’s much better to fail early than later. Let’s say I didn’t fail and got into college. When I did finally hit my first big failure – and there’s no doubt I would have – it may have been at 25, with college debt and a narrow set of marketable skills. Or 30, when my life is entangled with relationships and bills. Or 35, when I have to take care of a family. No, the absolute best time to fail is as early as possible, and 19 seems like a pretty good age for that. I’ve still got a lot of options on my plate and I’m not constrained by anything but me.
As I know now, that failure ended up being the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I’ve realized that it’s good to get used to failure because if you’re ever going to do something of importance, you’re going to fail several times before that. Relish it. Squeeze every lesson you can from it. I’m nothing but thankful for failure because without it, I would not have learned any of this. I would not be sitting here writing this blog post and enjoying life.
I could have done without the days of crying, though.
I’ll be posting more about my life, computers, and living in the 21st century. You can chat with me on twitter, @parismitton.