After two weeks of Winter Olympics euphoria in Vancouver (or rather 2 weeks of heavy workload without lecture interference, not that I attend lecture), I have immediately faced the realities of several setbacks. Inability to meet a professor to discuss about the promotion of an internationally-recognized technical conference due to overwhelming workload and schedule. A Toastmasters meeting (with the club that I co-founded) being cancelled in the last minute due to low attendance. Lately in the last few terms, receiving less-than-desirable grades despite sinking my effort and time into it at my social and family life’s expense (at times even sanity). To me on a certain level, those were signs of failure. I do not feel good at times when I’m dealing with the consequences of those failure.

After going through some blogs related to this topic, while my views have yet to change significantly, they got me at least thinking about success, failure, and perfection in retrospect. I found myself having the problem of being a perfectionist. For example, when taking courses, I focus to exert the effort and time required to achieve near perfection grades. I gave up a lot of socializing opportunities even when they won’t affect my ability to achieve decent grades (although would affect my chances of getting the grades that I was aiming for). The goal was so hard to reach that I became constantly frustrated when results aren’t being met, upset b/c of the amount of fun I could have had doing other things, and burnt out b/c I felt my resources are being wasted. Srinivas Rao’s guest post on Nicole Crimaldi’s blog about the comparison between success and perfection pointed out a key issue that most people ignore. The report cards were never acknowledged for effort. Rather expectations on meeting certain grades are completed with regards to whether any new knowledge has been retained, or whether the work was any fun. I had neither when I went for perfection, as I felt it was needed for certain goals that were no longer relevant. I also went for it for the purposes of self-esteem, using the results of the grades on the report card system to convince me to feel rewarded (even though realistically this isn’t the case, proven by performance in certain job interviews in the past where I was deemed not social enough, thanks to giving up social opportunities to earn grades, or forgetting key concepts covered in some previous courses that were asked, as I was more focused on getting the grades than actually learning the material without considering the scholastic consequences. Failure is a part and foundation of success. It is often times a very challenging setback to swallow and handle.

This problem often stems from personal attachment to achieving success. No one wants to fail at anything. Rao has another blog post that was very enlightening. He talked about the 6 signs of being too attached to success. I will relist them here.

1. Not living in the present. I have realized that I have doing too much in the present moment to improve my chances to achieve a desired state in the future. What ends up happening being the plans not working out, and I have upset and bitter about wasting the time in the past rather than enjoying myself. This change is a gradual process. While I have aggressively worked out future plans to be as planned in the past, currently I tried not to let this lingering too much in my mind affecting my health and sanity by working it out on my own pace. I have also totally scrapped the old ways of laying out future career plans and focused on networking with other bloggers that weren’t even expected last year or two years ago. I am focusing on what I want to do in the future, and work out the steps to get there on my own healthy pace.
2. Fundamentals are abandoned. While I remembered I did well on the fundamentals, when faced with an ever more challenging problem, my anxiety and excitement got a hold of me. I was so focused on solving the problem that I either lose sight of the big picture, or I forgot the required fundamentals to solve it. Efforts should be exerted to at least remind oneself that fundamentals cannot be abandoned in order to achieve success.
3. Doing things that is known not to work. Being attached to the outcome may yield a situation where the goal is known to be too difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish. As a result, failures are more likely to occur, frustration would start to build. I’m currently in the progress of making smaller, more achievable goals that are easily measurable.
4. Stop having fun. When you stop having fun with what you’re doing, then you really are not going to succeed. Even if you do succeed it’s not going to be very fulfilling. For example, in my case, sometimes I get overloaded with responsibilities that people from various volunteering organizations. I could not unload or delegate very much of those responsibilities. As a result, I toughed it out. Even though the outcomes of fulfilling those responsibilities were successful, it did not feel fulfilling at all personally. The reason stems from either the setbacks I encounter as a result of such time investment, such as grade degradation, schedules of my other tasks fallen behind, lack of sleep, socialness, wellness, etc. I just stopped having fun (and still not really having fun, but it is getting marginally better).
5. Continually compare to a previous success. I also struggle with this one. I felt that I have been in a drought of recent scholar success, as I have been very attached to scholastic achievements. In reality, unless I really want to stay in academia (which I am not having fun in school whatsoever), scholastic achievements complement very little, if at all, to success in finding new career and business opportunities. At least this is a reminder for me to not push myself over the edge health-wise to achieve certain goals. It’s just not worth it in the long-run (although I am a very near-sighted person).
6. Going nuts on a minor setback. This happened just 2 days ago. When some of my team members wrote close to completely incomprehensible report content for a report, I was physically and mentally tired and frustrated due to being overloaded with other new responsibilities just fallen on my plate that I was cursing 10 words per minute for a while. I had gone nuts about the amount of extra time I have to spend to edit at the expense of my needed sleep. A person who is not as attached to success likely would’ve handled one self better, i.e. not going nuts and swearing all over the place.

To cap off this post, I would like to bring a final example of how the Vancouver Olympics organizing committee (VANOC) handled a certain adversity. During the 2010 Winter Olympics opening ceremony, when a Canadian legendary icon, Wayne Gretzky, tried to light the cauldron, it malfunctioned. Critics were all over this debacle happening in an event where nothing should go wrong if well-planned. No one saw a clown engineer fixing the cauldron coming in the closing ceremony, before Catriona Le May Doan, another Canadian athletic icon, lighted it with the Olympic flame. It shows that failure is part of the process to success sometimes.

What are your thoughts? Please feel free to send an email to blog@sysil.com or leave a comment below.