Describe a failure in your life, and what you've done to fix it?

Prompt: Describe a failure in your life, and how you overcame it.

I regard anything that I don't realize that I'm doing wrong to be a failure. It's not because I doubt my self-worth, or because I feel like I have something to prove. I push myself harder than I know my teachers will, because I want to be at that level. I want to be able to examine a project or a product that I've worked on and be proud, instead of picking out every little detail that I feel I should have done something else with.

My tendency to stress over the smallest details was something that held me back for part of my freshman year. I would sometimes struggle with the urge to fix my group members' work, knowing that there might be minor mistakes, like spelling errors. But this characteristic wasn't as strong as my shyness, and often led to my unhappiness at the end product of a group project. This reached its peak until one particular project last year.

In our class, we were required to create a comic book based on cell elements, then present it to the class. Biology was a subject that I loved, but art was an area that I wasn't as experienced in. I assumed that I could focus on the biology section, while my group members worked on the story and the drawings. Unfortunately, my assumption was nowhere near the truth. I ended up trying to balance all three components while struggling to motivate my group into helping. To my genuine surprise, most of them honestly didn't care about school or their grades.

As a group, we began to fall behind, and I panicked. Failing a project would be horrible, but failing a project in my favorite subject would be unbearable. So finally, feeling that there was no other choice, I talked to the teacher about my group members' lack on contribution to the comic book. I was assured that they would be docked points for their refusal to help, and that it wouldn't impact my grade. When I got home, I sat at my computer, and began to work on the project.

It took me nearly twelve hours to finish the project. By the time I was done, I didn't bother going to sleep since I knew I'd have to go to school in less than three hours. So I rehearsed and read the story, feeling rather proud of myself. Once I reached school I realized that there was one little problem. None of my group members knew what the comic book story was, since I had been the one to write it. I ended up explaining the entire comic book, cringing at some of the details that I had forgotten. I did receive a high grade for that project, to my surprise.

This project stands out in my mind because of the amount of stress that I put on myself to create a perfect product. I ended up failing at that goal in my mind, but received a high grade anyways. It was a starting point for the realization that perfection is unattainable, and that failure isn't always what it seems like in my mind. I do struggle with my expectations of myself, but I also know that failure is a part of life.

Hi IHaile,
I am so sorry to say that your essay is quite messy. For this kind of prompt, I advised you to go directly into the event of your failure.


For your opening, at first, I thought that you may want to talk about your overconfidence or your characteristic of caring every detail. Maybe those characteristic has made you fail to accomplish something. However, after this opening you started talking about your vulnerable state in your Spanish class, which made me so confused. May I ask what are trying to say in your opening :(?


You talk about how the rapping in your Spanish class became your motivation but how? How is that your motivation? Is that because you feel rewarding after the presentation? Or is that because you feel so ashamed of rapping too bad in Spanish class? And then you talked about working on speech skills. How did you do that? I see you went to teacher for advice. What is the advice? What else you have done to make friends?

Also, because the question asks for your failure so describe more your failure to show them that it is a truly horrified failure in your life. And how you overcome that. :)

Hope this help