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The mission of The Success-Failure Project is to create opportunities for discussion, reflection, understanding, and creative engagement regarding issues of success, failure, and resilience. |
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The mission of The Success-Failure Project is to create opportunities for discussion, reflection, understanding, and creative engagement regarding issues of success, failure, and resilience. |
So, you’re saying FAILURE is good?
It’s neither good nor bad, but it is inevitable. When we’re learning or trying something new, we can assume we will make mistakes or fail at some point. If we allow ourselves to feel the difficult emotions that may accompany our setbacks — sadness, confusion, disappointment, frustration, or others — while also framing the failure as part of a learning process, we can reap huge benefits.
What about my family’s and my friends’ definitions of SUCCESS?
The main characters in our lives often play big roles in how we define success and failure. Sometimes they’re supportive of our efforts to re-examine these ideas. When they are, the relationship often deepens. But it can also can be challenging to have these conversations when people have strong opinions. The Bureau of Study Counsel staff welcomes this kind of exploration.
Won’t I lose motivation if I’m not afraid of failing?
If fear of failing has been your main motivator, it might take a while before you can find other ways to engage. However, fear of failing is only one possible source of motivation, and you may find sources that better tap your curiosity and actually bring joy. It may be helpful to talk with someone as you explore this, and the Bureau of Study Counsel is one place where conversations like this are always welcome.
Can I explore SUCCESS and FAILURE before I talk with someone or attend an event?
Yes! Our website has many materials including faculty stories of rejection, how views of success and failure change over time, alumni reflecting on success and failure, and first-generation students sharing their perspective.
Watch videos of Harvard alumni from past decades reflecting on the meaning of "success" and "failure" in their work and lives as they listen to audio recordings of their younger selves.
View portraits of Harvard College alumni and read their stories about experiences that have influenced their sense of self, their expectations, and their definitions of success and failure.
Watch Harvard faculty, deans, staff and alums reflect on their experiences with rejection and see some of the actual letters they received.
Listen to audio recordings of first-generation college students at Harvard speaking with someone who matters to them in this collaboration with StoryCorps.
Keith Grubb
Harvard College, Class of 2013
"I think I was really attached to [the idea of having a travel fellowship] because I was feeling afraid of being so uncertain…"
"How openheartedly do you want to live in the world? How much do you want to let yourself love, desire, and hope?"
"I had to accept that after doing basic research for four years that that wasn't really where my heart was ..."
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“Do right by them…because they did right by me”David discusses with his mentor Janice Anderson what his family did for him as a child.
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“Do right by them…because they did right by me”
David: Friend, Student
Ms. Anderson: Mentor
David: The first way of looking at the term “first generation” is how it speaks, how it resonates with me on a personal level. So, knowing that my parents came here in ‘94, together in San Diego, and uh, knowing that the reasons why they came here, uh, kind of gives me a sense of expectations. Not because they were pressuring me to, like, attend these prestigious institutions, but more like, I wanted to do right by them, because they’ve done right by me.
Uh, I remember a time in my life, where uh, you know, my mom would always tell me, like, to – it was important to work hard but also important to have dreams, right? You know, not, to think about achieving those dreams, even if they’re implausible in the moment and always to keep working towards those dreams.
So, you know, um, we weren’t necessarily in the best economic situation at the time. And still, right now, we’re sort of struggling a little bit. But uh, back when I was young my mother would take us to the library all the time, she would like – she had these little cardboard boxes that she would uh paste over with wallpaper, and we would load books into them and then bring them home cause we couldn’t afford to buy all those books at the time. So we made like biweekly trips to the library, land we’d load up on these books, and then come home and read them.
Note about copyright, attribution, and citation: StoryCorps holds the copyright to the audio recordings of interviews and to the photographs of the participants; StoryCorps has licensed limited use of those to the Bureau of Study Counsel/Harvard University. Harvard University owns the copyright to all other material on the First-Gen Voices website (bsc.harvard.edu/first-gen-voices). Quotations of the transcripts and translations of interviews from the website by parties other than StoryCorps and the Bureau of Study Counsel should be attributed/cited as follows: “This excerpt is from a website created by the Bureau of Study Counsel of Harvard University with interviews recorded by StoryCorps (www.storycorps.org), a national nonprofit whose mission is to preserve and share humanity's stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world.”