Getting a ‘D’ in exams is not a direct ticket to failure in life

Let me start here. I am a product of the 8-4-4 system. And for the record, I got an ‘A’ in KCSE. But there is something else I have seen under the sun.

And so my article today is addressed to people who will probably not read it. It is dedicated to more than half the candidates who sat for last year’s KCSE and when the results were announced they had scored ‘D’ and below.
It is dedicated to the 295,463 out of 574,125 candidates who cannot even join the security forces or teaching, which require a mean grade of D+ and above.

You see, friends, when I was at school, there was a huge amount of pressure to pursue higher education. The thought process seemed to be that you work hard for good grades so that you get into a good university and then get a ‘proper job’ at the end of it.

Sadly, I’ve often heard many otherwise smart people complain that success is out of their reach as they didn’t get good grades and/or didn’t go to university. But this is what I have seen.

Everyone fails in life at some point. If you haven’t experienced any monumental failures yet, then just wait, eventually you will.

I’ve failed many times in my life and still do. I’ve failed in business and in relationships. But, through my many failures I’ve learned some important lessons that I’d like to share with you.

Nobody likes to fail. But to be honest, there is no success without some amount of failure. Great inventors such as Thomas Edison experienced a lot of failures on the way to a successful creation. Even the best soccer players strike out much more often than they score a goal.

Anyone pursuing a goal of value will make mistakes and wrong decisions. So the key is to expect failure, to prepare for it, to be ready to turn it into a lesson and a stepping-stone to success. There is such a thing as a successful failure.
I sat for my KCSE exams in 1996. What we really learn when we study for KCSE is how to tick boxes and how to answer questions in a specific way.

Being ‘good’ at exams is a skill in itself and not necessarily indicative of how hard we have worked. And truth is, some people will naturally find exams easy because they have a pretty good short term memory.

They may be easily able to retain a lot of information for the exam, regurgitate this information only to then pretty much forget it all once the exam is over.

My point is, formal education is all about ‘colouring within the lines’ and adhering to a certain formula.

I have been and worked with entrepreneurs for the last 12 years. Entrepreneurship is about thinking creatively and outside of the box. These are skills that are often not honed within school.

And it involves a lot of failure.

When we think about failure, we think of things in a negative light. We say that failure is painful and that it causes emotional turmoil and upset, and inflicts agonising pangs of guilt, regret, and remorse.

Those of us who have known true failure, and have bounced back from it, understand that failure in life is necessary for success. Sure, failing hurts. In fact, it cuts deep like a razor, slicing its way to our inner core. Yet, it’s necessary. And the most successful people in life have failed the most times. If you try to go through life without failing at anything, then you’re not really living a life at all. Taking risks and falling down flat on our faces is part of life; it makes us into who we are.

The thing is, our past is not dictated by our future and what or who we choose to become does not depend on what we have done previously. We can instead learn from previous failures and use them as an opportunity to try again.

“How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?” a reporter asked Thomas Edison. “I didn’t fail 1,000 times,” Edison responded. “The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”

May that phrase be etched into your collective memory forever.

Mr Waswa is a management and HR specialist and managing director of Outdoors Africa.
E-mail: [email protected]