Learning how to fail

We spend most of our lives learning how to succeed. We’re taught to get ‘A’ on tests, get the ‘right’ job and avoid mistakes at all costs. We put a great value on not failing. But what if we did the opposite? What if we learnt how to fail? What if there was an optimal way to make mistakes? 

In my own case, my failures have been extremely helpful in making me better. They’ve shaped my personality and pushed me to become better in ways that easy wins never could. After high school, I tried to get into the prestigious IITs for my undergrad. I gave my best, but I couldn’t get in. That failure did hurt a lot but it also forced me to dissect what went wrong, rebuild my study habits, and dig deeper. The painful process ultimately helped me get into grad school at one of the IITs. 

Recently, I interned at Amazon over the summer. Getting internship was a nice personal win but the path to getting the internship was full of mini failures. In 2023, I applied to multiple places... and heard nothing. Just a void of silence, with the occasional rejection. I did not enjoy the process of applying for internships and starting dreading it. Ultimately, the rejections forced me to take the easy option - try next year. In 2024, the goal resurfaced, but so did the fear. I started the search again, but without my full heart. I wasted most of the fall semester, and missed out on a lot of good opportunities. At the beginning of 2025, I decided ‘this is it’. I have to find an internship this time. I started applying for internships in full force, sending out applications and preparing for interviews. At first, it was just like before. Every rejection email was discouraging. To make things worse, I kept running into a new wall: “Not hiring international students”. Fortunately, soon I started getting some interviews and saw a few glimmers of hope. But then i encountered the "almosts"—the failures that hurt the most.

My Internship Application Tracker. Red Indicates Rejections!!

First, I interviewed with a FAANG company. The interview went incredibly well. I clicked with the team, I loved the project, and I walked away feeling confident. Then…radio silence. And ultimately, rejection. It was heartbreaking. I had spent so much time preparing and had gotten my hopes up, only to be rejected. Next, I interviewed with a promising biotech startup. Again, the interview was fantastic. I aced the technical questions and felt a real connection. They seemed excited. Then the company did poorly in its clinical trials. And it went under. Not only did I lose the potential internship, but an entire company full of people lost their jobs. I was back to square one, and honestly, pretty devastated. I had done everything "right," and it had all fallen apart for reasons completely outside my control.

Finally, things started to click after a while. I received offers from multiple places including Amazon. But that journey to getting the internship told me that learning how to fail is partly about managing the emotional fallout of failure and partly about overcoming the fear of failure. 

Failing hurts. It leads to stress, sadness, and self-doubt. The main issue is that these emotions need to be regulated. Ignoring them doesn't work—we need some stress to push us, to "wire" us to find a way out of a tough spot. But if we get too stressed or too sad, we get overwhelmed, depressed, or paralyzed. The challenge is finding the balance. In my case, it was about letting myself feel the disappointment of the FAANG rejection ("This sucks, and I'm allowed to be upset") without letting it define me ("I'm a failure and will never get a job"). And it was also about accepting the biotech startup’s collapse as a piece of bad luck, not a judgment on my worth. The other half of the lesson is overcoming the fear of failure. For a whole year, I was so caught up in the trap of fearing rejection that I was afraid to even try.

I'm still figuring out how to do this perfectly. But I've learned that it's about separating the event (the failure) from identity (who you are). It’s about letting things happen, good or bad, and knowing that you have the resilience to handle anything. And most importantly, it's about remembering, something that is often misattributed to Churchill, ’Success isn’t final and failure isn’t fatal but it’s the courage to continue that counts’.