Undergraduate /
"Here's your winner and new state champion" - Common app #2 Prompt [4]
Universities where I applied:
MIT, Vanderbilt, Stanford, Duke, Cornell, Columbia, UDenver, UChicago, U Notre Dame, UMiami, Washington at St. Louis, Harvard, Upenn, Rhodes College, Grinnell, Trinity College and Colorado Boulder
Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what lessons did you learn?"Here's your winner and new state champion, Khaled Aounallah".
For all I can remember, I always aspired to be state champion. Since my first day of Kung-Fu, I had that championship in sight. This tournament was the best opportunity to demonstrate the skills I gained during an assiduous three-year journey as a martial arts disciple. My hard work made everyone believe I would win. My teammates nominated me for the gold and my friends assured me that my chances of winning were good. However, instead of being humble about my capacities, I was convinced that I was unbeatable.
The big day arrived and I knew the identity of my opponent: a novice with only a two-month training. Smiling, I strolled to the ring sedately. I was overly confident thinking: "What can a rookie do?"
Well, as you have already guessed.I was KNOCKED-OUT. Ten seconds were enough to see me on the ground. I blacked out. I couldn't even hear the referee's ten-count. The "rookie" did it: He shattered my dreams. I had worked painstakingly towards something only to have all that effort taken away.
The pain I felt on my way to the locker room was so intense that I cannot articulate it into words. My shame knew no bounds. I spent the car ride home neglecting my parents' words of consolation, the ten-second-knockout replaying in my head. The fact that I betrayed everyone who stayed in my corner immersed me in a deep melancholy. I couldn't stop obsessing over my failure.
I was so disheartened that I never imagined the sting of my disappointment fading away. But one day, as I was rearranging some old books, I found my first diary. Twelve years ago, I wrote: "When I grow up, I want to be a superhero like Batman."
It might seem implausible but my dream never changed. I still want to be a superhero; except that this heroism is linked to engineering and Kung-Fu. That sentence I wrote a long time ago made me remember an incident that happened to Bruce Wayne, the Batman. As a kid, he was trapped in hole. His father came to his rescue and consoled him: "Why do we fall Bruce? ...So that we pick ourselves up."
How can I be a superhero then if I'm unable to pick myself up after every fall? How can I become a successful man if I can't cope with such failures? At that moment, a myriad number of great people names started popping inside my head and I was thinking: If Thomas Edison had believed in failure, we would be living in darkness. If Henry Ford had given up, we would be riding on horseback. I came to the conclusion that anyone who has achieved anything great has failed someday. What made the difference was that while ordinary people were moping about their past mistakes, these "heroes", not smarter or biologically different, woke up everyday to perform better by learning from their past failures.
This experience was more than didactic. It enabled me to learn two major lessons: Firstly, I realized that my haughtiness had cost me my dream. Since that fateful day, I changed my mindset at Kung-Fu, at school and at everything I do. I was able to perceive that humility is a cornerstone of success and that perfection can never be attained; there is always a room for progress. The minute we start thinking we're perfect, we're always setup for a fall.
Secondly, this experience made me rethink my conception of failure. It's a powerful learning tool and if we don't learn to fail, we fail to learn. This way, failure doesn't oppose success but it's a part of it: They are both sides of the same coin. Nobody is lucky enough to always get the winning side. What matters is that even after we fail, we keep flipping the coin until we succeed.
Any feedback is appreciated. Be Objective, please!!
Thank you
