Pre-reading vocabulary list:
- Essential: Absolutely necessary; extremely important.
- Truism: A statement that is obviously true and says nothing new or interesting.
- Relentless: Harsh or inflexible.
- Burnout: Physical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress.
- Utterance: The action of saying or expressing something aloud.
‘Learning how to respond to making mistakes is an essential part of becoming successful.’ What is your opinion?
The Covid-19 pandemic has been extremely tiring for many of us. Many adults have lost their jobs, or have had to deal with the stresses of their businesses doing poorly. Many children and teenagers, meanwhile, have had to deal with the anxiety and fatigue of not being able to understand the pandemic fully, and the stresses of learning from home on online platforms that do not reproduce properly the experience of being in a classroom. Even when we are in classrooms, we have to wear masks. In this context, the truism that learning from our mistakes is crucial strikes me as a little inappropriate for these times. People of all ages in Singapore have suffered from the relentless pursuit for success, and many of us have realised that pursuing success at all costs is, in fact, a major mistake that many in our society have made.
While it is true that to get on the road to success we have to learn helpful responses to failing and making mistakes, we sometimes have to allow ourselves to stop chasing success. Paradoxically, success could lie in that practice. When we learn how to cook, we sometimes have to figure out why a particular dish we just cooked tastes bad. When we learn how to play a musical instrument, we sometimes have to figure out why a song we just played sounds bad. There are some people who give up when they fail, and worse, even people who avoid trying to be good at something just because they are afraid of failure. Anyone who wants to be a straight-A student has to be willing to try and fail, because the only path to success is to keep on trying till you succeed — and a person who tries anything worth trying will inevitably make mistakes along the way. What should we do, however, about the fact that chasing success is sometimes the crucial mistake that we make? The Covid-19 pandemic saw many of my most hardworking friends try to keep up with their usual pace of work, but some of them have ended up experiencing burnout, and have had to stop working as hard because they chased after academic success without considering the larger challenge of successfully taking care of their mental and physical health. For them, learning how to stop chasing success has been essential in staying healthy and happy.
On the level of language, let us note that the word “success” has power; the mere utterance of that word can create in people the desire for the thing itself. Since these friends of mine find me a helpful person to talk to, I have found myself listening to their conflicting desires for rest, play, and success. Sometimes a human being just needs to give up for awhile. Sometimes we need to play till sanity returns. Unfortunately, some people have such difficulty even allowing themselves thirty minutes to play a video game or to watch a show, because they think that they have to be perpetually grinding on towards their goals. Sometimes we have to be willing to let our truisms go, no matter how true they are, because there are always other truths that we have to account for, like the truth that suicide rates among young people in Singapore rose worryingly in 2020. It strikes me as more important to be able to say to people: be willing to fail, and be willing to fail joyfully and healthily. As our Education Minister Chan Chun Sing says, we must have frank conversations about the definitions of success. It is my view that learning how to respond to making mistakes is an essential part of becoming successful, and that the most important lesson in season of the Covid-19 pandemic has been that of the necessity to be comfortable with failure.
It is my hope that with that lesson learnt, as a nation we will be able to live with more love for ourselves and each other, more joy in life itself, and more hope for the future. That would see us, I think, becoming successful not just as individuals but as a society that has achieved a kind of happiness and prosperity that is truly worth celebrating.
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