Throughout my life, the only thing I've been successful in is failing. The most prominent example might be sports. I've played basketball since early elementary school (I'm deep into high school now) and never once have I been on a winning team. On my middle school team we played 22 games over the course of two season. We won three games. Volleyball was even worse. For starters, I was on a club team so my parents were paying for me to fail. For the two seasons I played with this volleyball team, we basically lost every game of every tournament (except one; yay!). I have never been great at sports, but I made sure to give it my all. I showed up to every practice and every game of each sport I played, even when things were happening at the same time. The basketball season for school overlapped with the club volleyball season, so often I would leave a painful basketball practice and eat a stale protein bar while driving to Durham for volleyball practice. The dedication I had to every activity I did was insane, and there was no reason to care that much about a cruddy sports team, but I did anyway. Of course, sports isn't the only aspect of life I've failed in. My mom introduced me and my siblings to the Doodle for Google contest in early elementary school and every year since I've made sure to submit something. Now this might come as a surprise, but I've never won. There are hundreds of thousands of submissions every year and if I'm being honest, my artistic skills are barely better than my athletic skills, so there's no reason to expect me to win. No matter how much effort or work I put into crafting the perfect illustration, I'm not going to win. Still, every year I eagerly await the new prompt that gets released each winter, and then I try my best to create a perfect drawing. Can I at least get an A for effort? Now maybe you're thinking "if you're not good at sports or art, maybe you're good at music?" That would be a fair question. I'll at least say that my music skills are tremendously stronger than my athletic or artistic ones. Still, they're not great. I had an amazing band teacher in middle school and he encouraged everyone to try out for local music competitions, and I did. For these auditions I had to play scales, a prepared piece, and some sight-reading. For jazz auditions I also had to improv over specific chord changes. I practiced and practiced for months leading up to the auditions. My saxophone teacher would help me, providing tips and feedback after hearing the same solo over and over again. I never made it into any music group I auditioned for, even the ones that were limited to just my county. I would watch the same people I was in band with excel and make it into these different musical groups while I was only involved with music at a school level. That last essay I posted (the one about pancakes) was written with the sole purpose of entering the essay contest on this site. I referred back to notes I had taken about essay structure throughout the school year last year. I made an outline first and then filled it in with explanation, all on a separate document. I made sure not to use contractions in my essay because that wouldn't be proper grammar for that style of writing. I carefully watched the character count and once I had gotten it down to exactly 5,000 I pasted the essay into the upload box and posted it. Now is that essay going to win the contest? I'd be willing to bet a large sum of money that it won't. It doesn't matter how late I stayed up working on it or how much time I invested in the idea, if it's not good enough, it's not good enough, and this experience will just be yet another fail to add to my resume. Now there's a lot more I could talk about. I could explain how I've failed at making friends after cutting everyone off my freshman year of high school. I could explain how I've failed at various cooking competitions I've entered. I could explain how I every year I snag a minor role in my church musical but fail to actually sound good while singing. Alas, I do not have the time or characters to go into all of that. Instead, you'll just have to marvel over the fails I've shared with you and reflect on your own.