When we think about failure, we often think about teachable moments, right? Dozens of movies, songs and Commencement speeches focus on failures because those are the moments from which we can take something away.
But our relationship to our work has two different value outcomes: failure and success. And like failure, prestige also affects our work.
The other day, a friend asked me what I was most proud of out of my four years at Brown. My involvement in slam poetry and Brown's spoken-word poetry group, Word!, came to mind.
My proudest moment came freshman year, with the first performance my parents ever saw. My parents always knew about the romantic pen-to-the-paper side of me growing up, but they had never seen me perform live, nor had they ever read anything I'd written apart from a college application essay. To have them understand this part of me was a hallmark of my spoken word career. Not only did they understand my poetry, they also thought it was good.
Slam poetry, unlike spoken word, is competitive. There are tournaments. There are teams. There are rules, and at the end of the day, there are judges that place point values on your poetry. Two years ago, I competed in the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational, where I reached the semifinals. This experience completely changed the art of poetry and writing for me. I started strategizing. I developed poems that would appeal to certain judges. I could even whip out my stock race-based poem if I knew the judges would like it. The validation was refreshing, and I found myself competing in poetry slams at different venues and different schools.
But my satisfaction with these competitions and awards was a bit paradoxical. I originally started writing poetry for myself, my friends and my family. Now, I was writing poetry for people I didn't even know. Why did I feel better about myself when those people accepted my poetry? And why was the recognition of my closest friends not enough?
Taken another way, sometimes failure is the absence of prestige, or at least that's the case in slam poetry. If you don't come home at the end of the night with the gold medal, then your poetry wasn't the best, and you failed. But anyone who has sat down to write poetry, or even a letter or a diary entry, knows the act of writing facilitates thoughtful reflection.
I'm not trying to say that awards and prestige are bad. But whatever it is we do with our work - be it poetry, education, engineering, medicine or whatever - there is always going to be a gold medal. And sometimes because of that gold medal, we will stop doing what we want to do and start doing what we want to want to do.
So the other night, after my friend asked me what accomplishment I was most proud of, I asked myself another question: Why do I do the things I do? And in answering that question, I realized that I had been doing slam poetry for the wrong reasons. And that, I would say, is my biggest failure.
Tim Natividad '12 is an ethnic studies concentrator from Amarillo, Texas. He will work for Google in New York City.
