Can Literature Help Us to Overcome Failure?

Literature provides a suitable medium for exploring the topic of success because success is variable. It provides a kaleidoscope that helps to examine limitless perspectives and concepts. Success requires core elements that involve integrating with people, understanding and synthesizing witnesses, and sharing and understanding human experiences that help promote open-mindedness and worldviews. Success helps us navigate from being educated to acquiring wisdom and inspiration and confronting the pros, cons, and failures of achieving success. 

I mentioned the word failure above because "a lot of literature is also about failure, a great many novels, plays, and poems are about people who messed up" (What is Literature For? 3:27). In contrast to success is failure, which ultimately is a building block; failure has a negative connotation, but it can motivate us to understand and get a better perspective and learn how much it matters to make us more reasonable individuals, to overcome failure and get in commitment to ourselves and do better. In terms of my lived experience, the evolution of success has come with failure, but my mentor, for the past eight years, has emphasized in many ways that it is a blessing. My educational journey thus far speaks volumes to that attestation, from attending elementary, middle, and high school, and now college in different countries and the struggles that ensued, such as the inequities and inequalities that shattered my confidence depending on the environment. Conversely, inner strength and resilience, also my best allies, helped me stay the course. During the process, I read, and am still reading, about overcoming my fears and struggles; it has helped me realize what makes me tick and motivates me. 

 

Not everyone sees success in the same light; different strokes exist for other folks. For example, success for an individual with limited education landing a minimum wage job claims success. But a potential stockbroker does not claim success until they have won a windfall in the stock market, that unexpected financial influx of money that wouldn’t have been otherwise. Moreover, success to others is materialism, and to others, non-materialism, such as inner peace, happiness, and fulfillment.  Then, success for the linear-minded person sees success as being prescriptive and details methodically how success should be achieved. In contrast, the descriptive individual may capture success as it evolves.