Not Getting What You Wanted
My favorite lecture is not a lecture from my faculty’s professors. Nor is it even from my university, or any other university in Indonesia.
It’s from a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who passed away 12 years ago. His name was Randy Pausch, and nearly a year before he passed away, he delivered what is now known as The Last Lecture.
For 76 minutes, Pausch talks about achieving his childhood dreams, whether that be flying in zero gravity, becoming a Disney Imagineer, and more. But my favorite part of his entire lecture is not about the dreams he achieved — it’s about the dream he failed to attain.
Pausch’s second dream as a child was to become an NFL player, a dream which didn’t pan out. But Pausch says “I probably got more from that dream and not accomplishing it than I got from any of the dreams that I did accomplish.”
He goes on to explain many lessons that I won’t get into much detail about here, but he points out that he learned all of these lessons indirectly. The values he gained from practicing football for years were not something he aimed to learn when he started playing — they were something he absorbed naturally throughout the process.
To conclude this dream of his, Pausch quotes an adage he learned in engineering, which is:
“Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.”
The quote is an interesting one because it reframes the conventional definition of failure (commonly understood as a negative outcome) as experience (a positive outcome).
But it’s something that I’ve found to be true over and over again.
Throughout college, there have been countless moments where I didn’t get what I wanted — as well as countless moments where I did get what I wanted. But looking back, the moments that shaped me to become a better person, the moments that allowed me to self-reflect and improve myself, were not the moments where I got what I wanted.
The elation of achievement is a great feeling, but it doesn’t necessarily inspire positive self-reflection. If anything, it often reinforces the self-belief that “I am doing amazing, I am smart, I am superior”.
But the moments where you didn’t get what you wanted are not moments of elation. They are not joyful moments. Most of the time, they aren’t moments you really want to remember.
But these moments are where you learn the most about yourself and about life. In the moments where you don’t achieve your goal, you’re forced to be honest with yourself and reflect on what you lack, as well as what you can improve.
For me, my constant failures to get what I wanted have taught me more about myself than my achievements ever have. The competitions I lost, the jobs I never heard back from, the grades I could’ve improved on. All of those experiences forced me to question what I did wrong, and also taught me how to react in the future when I fail to get what I want again (something inevitable as I enter the job market soon).
Failure is not something to pursue, don’t get me wrong. But understanding that initially negative outcomes can oftentimes lead to positive outcomes down the road is important.
Not getting what you want isn’t the end of the story — it’s merely a stepping stone on your journey.
