26A - Celebrating Failure

Assignment 26A – Celebrating Failure

1) This past semester, I failed several times to successfully hit a 405-pound deadlift. It has been a goal of mine since high school to pull the said 405lbs. Ever since my junior year of high school, I have lifted weights with consistency. I have trained hard and often deadlifted heavy, but until recently, I had never been able to meet this goal of mine.

After failing to deadlift 405lbs on over 10 different occasions, I started to become very discouraged. I had hit a plateau and had yet to break through that plateau and hit his personal record (PR). For the past 6 months or so, when friends would ask me what my max deadlift was, I would respond, “I’m stuck at 390lbs right now.” They would often respond with something along the lines of, “Haven’t you been stuck right around that weight for quite a while now?”

All my other lifts had improved with consistency, and I could not understand why my max-deadlift had hit a plateau.



2) After having failed time and time again, I finally decided to ask my friend Jacob for some advice. My friend Jacob is a powerlifter, whom has a max-deadlift of 567lbs (257.5 kilos). Jacob gave me a program that involved doing lighter weight and more repetitions to build further strength before once again attempting to deadlift 405lbs. His advice worked and within a month of following his program, I was able to hit 405lbs and my current max-deadlift is 431 lbs.

I learned two valuable lessons from this experience:

1. Don’t give up just because you aren’t yet seeing the results that you want to see.

2. Sometimes your social capital comes in handy. At times, it is necessary to request the advice of someone who has more expertise than you in a certain area.



3) Failure is no fun. It can be very embarrassing, and it certainly was for me. It is important to be open to change to overcome failure. I handle failure by adopting a mindset of determination. When I face failure, I form a strategy to overcome that failure, and I give 100% to do so.

Between this class and MAN3025, I have learned much about failure. I have learned the importance of learning from failure and even “welcoming failure” at times. Having an organizational environment that welcomes fear is very beneficial when it comes to fostering a culture of innovation. I do believe that I am less afraid of failure than I was a few months ago. I thrive in risky environments and welcome uncertainty/contingency.