Education and Career Decisions and Moving Forward With Goals

Good evening all!

This week I gained some really interesting insights that I learned through my Introduction to Entrepreneurship class. The first thing that comes to my mind from the reading this week is the idea of "failing forward" This is essentially the idea that we all fail constantly in this life, but rather than letting those failures beat us down, we should be letting them build us up. Thomas Edison failed over 1,000 times in an attempt to create the light bulb. Currently, the light bulb is used worldwide and is a crucial piece of technology in society. Imagine if he gave up and we still had no light bulb today. It would be horrible. Each of us has goals and tasks we would like to complete in this life. When we fail at achieving them, it doesn't mean that we are done for. We can push through the failures, learn from our mistakes and keep getting one step closer until we reach success; just as Thomas Edison did with the light bulb. It isn't any secret that everyone fails at different things in their lives. It is how we handle those failures that will define our true success in this life. 

The second and last insight that I wanted to share from my learning this week is about a young woman named Magdalena Yesil. At 12 years old, she lived in Instanbul, Turkey with a strong desire to learn about the field of technology. As she approached the end of her high school years, she was prepared with the university options she wanted to attend and did everything necessary to reach her goals. Her first options were IIT located in Chicago, and MIT located in Massachusetts. She chose IIT, not realizing that she would dislike the Chicago region. She still had the passion to learn her craft, but it was important to her to do it in a place that she could still enjoy her life. She decided to turn to Stanford University in California. This would give her a home that felt similar to Istanbul, and still allow her to push forward with her higher education. The point of this story is that there are multiple options we can choose to achieve the same goal. Some of the options are going to make us miserable, some content, and others full of joy. For Magdalena, Chicago helped her reach her goal, but she was miserable. Instead, she moved to Stanford, got the education she wanted and was very pleased with the region. If we aren't happy with an option we are currently accepting, whether it is in our personal, professional, or educational goals, then we should find other options to achieve the same goals and bring us joy at the same time.