(upbeat music)
(audience applauding)
- Hello, my name's Colin Stewart.
I work for student involvement, and I'm gonna be talking
about failure today and it's not lost on me
that my name is right below failure,
so it's a good start, it's been a good day to go.
We don't often talk about failure so openly,
or we don't often encourage failure,
but failure is a critical part of success.
And often we look at failure it's on the opposite side.
If you're a success, then it has nothing to do with failure.
But I believe pretty strongly that failure
is a critical part of success,
of getting accomplishments done.
I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about some famous people
and some famous failures, Barack Obama,
in the year 2000 actually lost the election for Congress.
If he gave up then, he would've never become president.
I read a lot of articles that showed that by losing
that actually set him on the path to become
President of the United States of America,
but if he didn't go for it after he failed,
we would've never had him as president.
I'd also be remiss if I didn't talk about
the great prophet Lady Gaga.
When she got her career, her start, she actually
wanted to go into acting, and she was told you're horrible.
And she goes well I guess I'll try singing.
And that worked out for her pretty well.
And isn't it ironic that she just won an Oscar
at this last season, right?
Going after bold, big ideas, that's what it's about.
I also observed, I went to the ASU basketball game,
and ASU is ranked I think around 50,
they were playing against Kansas.
I'm not a big sports fan.
Kansas was ranked number one, they were slated to lose,
and they played horribly, ASU, they took more shots,
they missed more shots, but by the end of the game,
they actually slowly picked up,
and they actually won the game.
If you look at this and you see this,
I'm sure you're pointing at and you can see something.
I'm sure those perfectionists in the room
are getting really uncomfortable right now.
But we need to focus less on our failures
in the bigger picture because if we only focus
on our failures, we miss so much of what we have to offer.
We also need to be open to more criticism.
And on both sides of the story.
I know I'll talk about me, I need to do better job at
providing criticism and feedback,
but we also need to realize it's about helping us
get better, it's about doing our jobs better for students.
It's a great picture, isn't it?
We also need to go into situations
with humility and a blank slate.
If we always go into the room going I have nothing to learn,
nothing to gain, and I know exactly what I need to do,
we'll never grow or learn.
We need to have more humility and a sense of openness
to the different ideas that are out there
because if we don't, we're not gonna learn anything.
We also need to change how we respond to other's failures.
Often, I think, and I'll speak for me, when I fail,
I feel very isolated, but if I had people that
were supporting me when I failed,
I would feel so much better.
And so we need to support those that are failing out there
and I think they'll go a lot farther.
Embarrassment, I think we need to be more comfortable
with embarrassment and I'm gonna tell an embarrassing story.
When I got here, my collar was popped up,
thank you Jim Marshall for helping me out with that.
I appreciate that, I had some dog hair on my jacket.
Thanks to the interpreters who go, oh you have some dog hair
and I'm like, wow, everyone's so helpy.
Someone's like your fly's down,
and I'm like, well thank you.
I had an embarrassing start to the day,
but the more we help each other out,
the better we can do.
We also need to look for the
opportunities in the midst of crisis.
We have a lot of low-hanging fruit on campus in our students
and if we look for those opportunities
and we search for them, we can be so much more successful
even though there's things that are wrong
or there's failures, there's so much out there.
And when we look at our students, we heard today
a story about a student that worked 40 hours a week.
They had three jobs, they're really going the distance.
You cannot have grit and persistence
without being used to failure.
And so we need to get more used to failing
so we can be better.
When we look at our educational system,
I would say we'd be hard pressed to say
that the US American educational system is perfect.
We have a lot of work to do,
and even ask how we set up and look at
how we set students up for success.
I'm gonna just critique one thing.
SATs and ACTs, they say that these are markers for success
in higher education, and I would push back on that.
And I think we need to be looking at more
how much are students willing to learn.
How much are they willing to fail.
And how can we help them to get there.
And I think if we change that,
that'll change the way that we do education.
We also need to be better at owning our failures
and proud of our failures.
If we look at innovation in education,
there's so many opportunities, and one in particular,
I don't think we, we get so used to things,
and I actually, when I was walking over here,
forgot my umbrella, another proud moment for me today.
And I asked Murzad, Murzad's great.
She's got the best things in her office.
And she gave me this umbrella,
and so I was walking over here and I opened it up.
And I never used one of these umbrellas.
And it comes up like this.
And when you close the umbrella, it goes like this,
so you don't get any water.
I've lived my entire life getting water on me
as I've used an umbrella, and I've never used it.
And I didn't know that the umbrella was broke before.
Now I don't think I can ever go back to umbrellas the way,
all these other umbrellas, I need to get one of these things
but I didn't know the other umbrella was broken, right.
And we look at education, we're so used to the things,
the way that they are, we don't recognize
the challenge or the cracks that are in there
and so we don't know what we don't know.
So when it comes to failure, while I'm encouraging
and pushing us to fail, we can never fail our students.
Our students deserve the best, they deserve the opportunity
to succeed as we look at GI 2025.
Yes, we need to get as many students as we can to graduation
but not just graduating,
we need to get them to be well-rounded citizens.
They're not just getting another degree,
but they're getting opportunities for their whole life.
And we look at that, we create a culture
where students feel safe to fail,
imagine all the opportunities where they won't be afraid
to ask questions, afraid to take risks,
not afraid to be bold.
If we create that environment,
I think our educational system will be a lot stronger.
And I'll leave last with these words from Bob Ross,
"There are no mistakes, just happy accidents."
(audience member cheering)
Thank you so much.
(audience applauding)