Why Do We Fail? (7A)

In cheerleading it’s all about being precise, making all your motions look sharp and most importantly make the routine look like it was done effortlessly. My junior year of high school came around and it usually indicates that you’re a cheer veteran. By that I mean the veteran should know how they should be performing with little to no mistakes. We train hard and long hours so that we can show how good we really are.

A really exciting football game was coming up, and it was a home game. I personally love home games because the atmosphere we get from the crowed. They get all hyped up and excited to see the tigers dominate the field. Our coach decided that since we were expecting a huge crowed at the game that we would go out and perform at half time. With 3 years of performing in front of crowds, I didn’t have the slightest bit of worry on my mind. I practiced the week before the game and we nailed every aspect of the routine. Friday night came; the big game was soon to start! From what I can remember we were winning and the tigers had scored one more touchdown right before 2 quarter ended. The crowd was going wild, jumping up and down singing the Fight Song, which we sing after every touchdown.

It was the cheerleaders’ time to go out and give the crowd a little performance. We ran out onto the field and lined up ready to go. The music starts and my body fills up with adrenaline! There’s nothing that compares to the feeling I get when I’m out there on the field. The final second of the routine usually end in a pyramid formation. We all mount up the girls to do our last trick, and out of nowhere my flyer slips and falls right out of my hands. She falls but we are quick to respond and catch her safely. I was never so disappointed; I had failed.

My coach was disappointed in our group for falling down she decided to ground us from performing until we proved to her that I would never happen again. I had never felt such failure in my life. I had messed up badly and couldn’t make up for it. All I could do was take the punishment. In my experience it taught me to work ten times harder to master every skill in cheerleading. As my coach told us “it lit a fire under our butts to work harder.” I worked incredibly hard with my group to prove to the coach that we learned our lesson. Without my failure I wouldn’t be so motivated to strive for excellence and work hard for the skills I haven’t mastered. That’s why I believe that every kid needs a little failure so that it motivates him or her to win or be better. 

Kids should be open to experience failure because that feeling of failure is not pleasing, therefore it will make them change their ways to avoid feeling like a failure. In our society failure is not something you can be proud of. I believe failure makes us get better. We are humans, bound to make mistakes. Sometimes we make big mistakes that result into failure. In school, some failure may involve getting an F on a test, or losing in a sport. That may motivate students to study harder, or pay better attention in class to not get that F or feeling of failure. In society, you might have let down your boss at work or cheated on someone you’re in a relationship with. I consider those to be examples of failures because they lead to negative outcomes. When you let your boss down at work he may end up firing you, depending on how serious it was. Cheating on someone may cause the relationship to end.  Having a little failure in your life is good because it can push you to do great things. I don’t think I would recommend failure to kids, or anyone in general. Too much failure may lead to no motivation to improve.

With failure it’s important to know how to accept it and transform it into motivation. Take that failure and prove to yourself that you’re better than that. In my experience when I’ve failed or lost a competition in cheerleading, and look at the winning team and see how happy they are. They worked so hard for 1^st place and it paid off for them. I can see how happy they are that they won, it makes me want to work harder and come back the following year and be that team with the 1^st place trophy. Failure inspires us to come out on top and no longer be on the bottom. “You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.” –J.K Rowling. This quote relates back to what I was saying about failure bringing out a better you. Until you hit rock bottom or failure, you will never know how much you are capable of doing.