So the other day I failed a quiz. Completely and utterly failed it. For me, a competitive spirit, that was hard. I took one look at the statistic questions and knew I couldn’t do it. In my defense, the teacher hadn’t even assigned homework on the material covered in the quiz. So I sat there and turned my mind towards the questions I could answer. “God, calm my nerves” was my prayer. Fighting back tears I tried to do what I could until my professor came over and said, “You’re out of time.”

The funny thing is, I have don’t think I have ever failed before. Not in school. Not in anything. Sure, I’ve messed some things up, but I’ve never failed. One of my job interview questions was “tell me about a time you’ve failed. What did you do about it and what did you learn from it?” I didn’t really have a good answer. I guess I do now. Well, I failed a test because I didn’t do the homework because it wasn’t assigned yet. I studied like crazy. And I learned to ALWAYS overachieve. Okay, maybe not overachieve, but work hard.

Honestly, I think this failure was a good wake up call. A call saying “Hey. Yeah, you’re smart but don’t slack! You can still mess up. You can even fail. But you can get back up again.”