Resisting the fear of failure

Writing in the Chronicle Review, William Deresiewicz takes a wonderful long-view of just what we might do compared to just what we usually do with the opportunity of our lives.

He writes that our infatuation with "getting into" colleges, grad schools, advanced programs - brings on a specialization that "cuts you off, not only from everything else in the world, but also from everything else in yourself."

You refused to be enticed from your path by that great experience you had in AP history, or that trip you took to Costa Rica the summer after your junior year in college, or that terrific feeling you got taking care of kids when you did your rotation in pediatrics during your fourth year in medical school. But either way, either because you went with the flow or because you set your course very early, you wake up one day, maybe 20 years later, and you wonder what happened: how you got there, what it all means.

He talks about having a conversation about true self-efficacy:

There are some kids, she said, who get an A on a test and say, "I got it because it was easy." And there are other kids, the kind with self-efficacy or self-esteem, who get an A on a test and say, "I got it because I'm smart."

Again, there's nothing wrong with thinking that you got an A because you're smart. But what that Harvard student didn't realize—and it was really quite a shock to her when I suggested it—is that there is a third alternative. True self-esteem, I proposed, means not caring whether you get an A in the first place. True self-esteem means recognizing, despite everything that your upbringing has trained you to believe about yourself, that the grades you get—and the awards, and the test scores, and the trophies, and the acceptance letters—are not what defines who you are.

He finishes by saying that it is not self-indulgent, as many would have you believe, to exercise our "moral imagination" to pursue the possibilities of our lives.