Brian Tracy once famously said, “Failure is an absolute prerequisite for success. You learn to succeed from failing.” Throughout our lives we can all agree we’ve been through many failures. What next? You keep going. As babies growing up, we failed more than ever. We didn’t just accomplish learning to walk, using the restroom, or brushing our teeth on our own. It took time, practice, and most importantly failure. Failure is a natural part of life that should actually be rewarded. If I were to go out with a team of accomplished varsity high school basketball girls and lose to a JV middle school team, I know it’s a failure to learn from. As long as you’re putting in the effort, you’re already winning your own fight and the results stop mattering as much. I think the biggest lesson we can all learn success is how many times you had to fail to get there.

Reward failure as long as it’s with full effort. Failure is not something to punish. If we’re winning all the time, we think we don’t need to improve. In the world we live in, there is always room for improvement. Personally, being still new to tennis and joining iUPrep rather than a brick and mortar school for the first time allowed me to fail and pick myself up multiple times. I knew there would be times where I would want to go back to school and there would be times where I couldn’t see where I could go with playing tennis. With all of this being said, failure helped me. Failure taught me. Failure introduced me to achieving many things I never thought I could so far.