At New Trier, we are constantly inundated with messaging that equates success with elite colleges or athletic achievements.

Even the surrounding community contributes to this culture. Just drive through Wilmette—streets are named after Ivy League colleges. Instead of working to create a culture in which failure is seen as an opportunity
to learn, we fixate on being “successful.”

There is a standard that we feel we have to live up to, whether that means getting A’s, or getting into a well-known college.

We are terrified of failing because we believe that we have
to be as close to perfection as possible in order to achieve our goals. However, it is our failures that give us tools such as resilience or determination that we need to be successful.

Learning how to bounce back from mistakes might be more important in order to be successful than breezing through high school without any bumps in the road. However, sometimes the structure

of New Trier prevents us from appreciating failure.

Students are familiar with stress. There is enormous pressure to perform well in extracurriculars and to have a high GPA. We are taught from a young age that failure is something to be feared. We believe that we have to be perfect, or as close to it as possible at all times, and this is a factor in the stress that we constantly feel.

We are so focused on success that we often overlook the beauty of failure.

Failure gives us experience. When we fail, we reflect, and we fix mistakes that we made in order to improve. If we never experience failure in high school, we never learn to recalibrate to avoid making mistakes in the future.

Often, it is just as important to know what doesn’t work in order to ultimately succeed. Thomas Edison failed nearly 10,000 times while trying to make an electric light bulb. With each failure, he gained the knowledge of one more avenue that didn’t work. It was that accumulated knowledge, developed from nearly 10,000 failed attempts, that ultimately led to his success.

Even Google celebrates failure in the workplace. At Google, employees nominate themselves each month to win a monkey called “Whoops.” Google employees share their biggest mistake that they made that month, mistakes that often cost Google millions. Then, the person

who made the biggest mistake
wins and gets to keep Whoops the stuffed monkey on their desk for the next month. While this might seem humiliating, at Google, it is almost seen as an honor to win Whoops. This approach also enables Google’s employees to listen to and to learn from their coworkers’ and their own mistakes each month.

At New Trier, success is constantly highlighted which creates pressure to live up to ok standards. We always talk about getting A’s, good test scores, athletic recruitment, and the leads in the school plays. We never talk about getting cut from a play or sport, failing a test, which contributes to the mindset where students feel that they constantly need to be perfect.

However, we should be talking about these things, because the reality is that many students are probably going through something similar. Instead of always trying to ignore or to hide our mistakes, we need to embrace and learn from them. This shift is not going to take place overnight.

In order to normalize failure, New Trier, and the community as
a whole, needs to redefine success. Success comes in many forms. It is not just getting into a certain college, or having a perfect GPA, or being recruited as an athlete.

The reality is that failure is a part of life. We, as a school and a community, need to work on embracing it.