500 Word Essay on Failure

You will write a 500 word essay on what failure is and how it can lead to learning a lesson.

The word “failure”, by definition, is the condition of not achieving the desired end or ends. However, this standard definition does not come close to summing up the countless other meanings of failure. Every person, regardless of status, color, or sex, has had to deal with this issue at least once in their lifetime. Even so, each person’s definition of it can vary depending on their personal experiences. The interpretations of failure may differ, but failure itself involves not putting forth effort, being a disappointment, or not succeeding in a task.

An outline of an essay on failure:

1. Put the reader in the picture in the first paragraph. Provide the facts that can enable the reader to appreciate the scope of the failure. Use the journalist’s tools:

Who: what was your role?

What: what was the failure specifically?

Where: provide the details

When: provide the details

Why: why did it qualify as a failure in that setting?

2. Talk about the failure that was behind the failure. Was there a lack of communication? If so, what led to it? Again, this is material that many people avoid, but it can be valuable. To keep it from becoming too downbeat, remember that you must always be forgiving when you are talking about other people in your essays. Do not criticize others in your failure essay. If you avoid this you will be fine.

3. Talk about the sense of disorientation. You can endear yourself to your reader if you “confess” to the confusion that you faced without making too much of it.

4. Again, there’s no point in throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and most prompts do in fact ask about the lessons learned. So in your fourth paragraph you can come back to the typical spin about how you overcame the failure and the lessons you learned.

5. In your conclusion you can talk about the causes of the failure that you now understand. This can work even better than the more typical “hence this was not really a failure” conclusion. Really, failure gets a bad rap. Write a bit about it and what you learned about how it affects us. It just might work.

6. Conclusion- Don’t be afraid to analyze a failure, and don’t overdo the “without this failure I could never have achieved success” angle. Just write about what you learned and how this has helped you.