Confronting Failure, Achieving Success

Close your eyes and visualize what it would be like to be rewarded in an intense science competition being applauded by numerous people with a spotlight shining on you. For some, this is one kind of success that they aspire to. Of course success can be interpreted from different perspectives and shown in different ways; however, people seem to agree on the fact that successful people must have well-paid jobs, gorgeous houses, and tasty meals in various fancy restaurants, but not Laurence Shames. In his article"The Sweet Smell Isn’t All That Sweet", he argues against the typical idea of success and claims that you should set your goals at an almost unattainable height. Even if you fail at the end, you would fail in a beautiful way and attain something greater, being a step closer to the ultimate target. Moreover, as a student, it's perfectly normal to have failures, because we are all learning. In order to achieve Shames's idea of "success", a student should accept failure as a positive instead of a negative and be determined to obtain his or her desires in life.

Firstly, throughout college, students must confront failure bravely, which can ironically sometimes leads to success. For example, students in the science department are often assigned to do many lab reports and experiments and they always want to try something different. However most of time new lab results do not turn out as expected or the whole experiment fails due to the unpredictable errors, both of which bring about failure in the end. Therefore, according to Shames, we should have more tolerance"for the person...who aims gloriously high and falls unashamedly short"(213). In order to be successful, science students should be prepared to fail over and over again until they achieve their goals.

Secondly, more and more students abandon their dream at an