Transcript

| Stathis Kalyvas | TEDxPatras

[music] [music] [applause] hello today I will talk to you about failures and of course you will wonder what this topic has to do with the topic of the event which is opportunities and this is the relationship between these two concepts that I will develop today this is the university where I work it is a very nice place and a very nice university and I can say that I am lucky to be involved in the subject that I really like and to do it in the way that I really want from this point of view someone can say that I feel really happy and that I have reached the point that I really would like and here you can ask me you will tell us why I will tell you about failures and I say I start by telling you about something that I consider a successful outcome and how the topic of failure is related to this topic of success of getting someone to do what they really want the way they want which I believe is the most authentic measure of success and the relationship between these two concepts is a very, very widespread perception which is that the path to success is a linear path you go from good to better from better to best and in the end you get to where you really want in a way it climbs a mountain which each goal you achieve is better than the previous one is correct however this thing is correct this feeling I believe that it is wrong and not only that it is wrong but also a perception that often blocks and paralyzes people and today I want to refute it and show how it does not correspond to the truth and I will start from an observation this observation is very simple that the successes of each of us are often visible either because we ourselves project them or because they ourselves or because some others project them on us but our failures on these paths are invisible they are not things that we usually talk about many times when they create us and a bad feeling a trauma are things that we try to put behind us to forget to ignore them and the truth is that in reality things are different that not only is failure a common phenomenon in the course of each of us but I would say even more that the road to success is often paved through very specific failures that without these failures we would not reach we would not be able to achieve what we want and the reason for this discussion today is twofold the first reason is a somewhat new fashion that has started recently very faintly with an article published in the journal nature a some academics have started to put on their websites a new kind of resume the shadowy resume of their failures a highlighting for example the universities that did not accept them the scholarships that they failed to get the publications that they did not manage to achieve that in other words they did not do well and the reason they do it is precisely to emphasize that where they have arrived they have not arrived by one through a road that is paved with roses but many times walking a thorny path the second reason is that since I am not a psychologist nor have I done any research on this subject, I want to share my own experience with you and I wondered at one point, people often ask me how someone manages to become a professor at such a university, and to give it a more sobering tone, a while ago I had written something on Twitter that a well-known journalist, writer and not exceptional I would say, did not like, who replied to me saying that he would investigate exactly how I became a university professor, so to save him the trouble, I will also describe somewhat the beginning of this journey, mainly through the difficulties and failures I had and I will describe my personal experience, the things I learned through this personal journey that has brought me to this point where I am today, highlighting five relatively early failures and emphasizing the objective dimension of failures, that is, things that others see within this within these failures they recognize them as such but also the subjective feeling they have the fact that no one himself takes them as such failures my first failure was that I was not a good student in school I was a mediocre student my grades were 14 to 15 they were not 19 or 20 and in the continuous even though I was not a bad student I could not reach the level that would describe me as excellent I was not an excellent student and I experienced this as a failure because of course I lived in an environment where the measure of your value as a student was to be excellent my second failure was that I could not enter the school that I had first preference for in the Panhellenic exams at the time when it was the law school I failed in this goal and of course I felt very bad that I did not manage to reach the goal that I wanted unlike many of my friends and classmates the third failure for which I will tell you that when I applied to start a PhD to do a postgraduate degree in America, all the universities I applied to rejected me and I was also forced to interrupt my deferral and I ended up in the Navy and instead of being on a nice campus in America learning nice things I ended up in the shacks at Camp Canel if I remember correctly a completely different experience than I had imagined. The fourth failure is that when I applied again and finally a university accepted me, the one I accepted was the most difficult and the toughest of all, which instead of giving scholarships to the students it accepted, essentially made them compete and prove their worth within the program itself. It was like entering a pit of sharks and having to swim and emerge as the winner, let's say, a very, very difficult program that I was really in awe of. I faced it and it wasn't easy and I considered it a failure. I thought why do others like me go to universities that treat them differently? The fifth failure was that I managed to get into this university without a scholarship because I happened to be able to get a scholarship for one year from the Full Bright Foundation, an amazing foundation that gives opportunities to people like me who do n't have the financial means to study abroad. But this scholarship had a onerous condition precisely to protect Greece from the brain drain. It forces you to return for at least two years when you finish your studies. The logic being that you shouldn't leave. Of course, I experienced this very difficult because of course, after finishing university in America, I was able to find a job and suddenly I had to give up everything and return to Greece for two years. It wasn't easy. I consider these five failures, but all of them. These failures also had a bright side, an upside, and they managed to shape my path as they did and to shape me as a person, and I will explain to you why. The first upside was that as a mediocre student, what really drove me away from the system that was prevalent in schools at the time and unfortunately still prevails was the system of memorization. I could in no way enter into the logic of memorization. I even remember that in the presentation class at the Panhellenic exams, I did badly because I absolutely did not want to write the accepted essay that they had assigned us and I had written something that seemed very outside of the accepted standards. The good thing about this situation, however, was that I devoted a lot of time, the time that I did not dedicate to learning things by heart, to doing other things, reading, and engaging in things that interested me, and so I essentially managed to acquire, in a cursory, perhaps even self-taught way, a We had a fairly large culture and many books at home, so I took advantage of this time in a different way without it getting worn out and memorizing things that I would not have left behind over the years. The second upside was that I was not interested in law at all. The reason they had put it first was because they considered my major as the university that no one should enter. So the fact that I did not enter law sent me to the political science department of law, which was considered a kind of anteroom at the time, anteroom to law, where I discovered political science, which is my subject, the great love of my life. Really, the thing that interested me the most was that I would not have done it if I had entered law. Maybe I would be a lawyer today and I would not be here talking to you about these things. The third is that by failing to go to America the first time I applied and by forcing myself to do the My tenure as a permanent resident, first of all, I avoided the terrible hardship that most of my friends had, namely living abroad insubordinately, not being able to return and having to worry about the stress of their tenure, and at the same time, I gained terrible experiences, I made a lot of friends, I managed to improve my English to a significant extent, to prepare myself better, to mature perhaps more, it was one of the best things that has happened to me, namely, to do my tenure early in the fourth year, was that by managing to survive at the University of Chicago, which was very tough and I would not want to repeat that first year there, I prepared myself much better for my university career later, precisely because it is a competitive system, it is a tough system, while many friends and colleagues that I met later from other universities had a much harder time then, I had somehow shielded myself and prepared myself earlier, and finally this horrible obligation to Returning to Greece for two years turned out to be a great stroke of luck because it pushed me to start a research project that I would not have started otherwise and which went very well and brought very good results. I still remember the moment when the American authorities rejected my request not to return for years and I felt like it was the end of my life and yet this thing had a side that I had not imagined and that helped me a lot. Five lessons emerge from these five experiences and failures. And I will tell them very briefly. The first is that a failure is not always the same thing. Sometimes it tells us that we are not trying hard enough. We need to try harder. Other times, what it tells us is that we are not trying in the right way. We need to change the way we try. Other times, however, it tells us something very important. That what we are trying to achieve may not be what suits us. It is not what we should be trying for. And that is where this should push us to think about what we really want and this is a very important lesson. great lesson which is that we must try to achieve the correct diagnosis of a failure because we failed what exactly does this thing tell us what does it want to tell us an important element that I want to emphasize here is that bypassing the obstacles that come in front of us because this is failure obstacles that we cannot overcome forces us to think and follow the so- called shortcuts those paths that bypass these obstacles that make us more flexible smarter more effective and often much more creative failure is essentially the food of creativity it gives us to understand how we can reach the same goal possibly from a completely different path and this path to use the well-known analogy of Ithaca is the one that ultimately counts the most but the most important thing of all is that failure really helps us to discover our true preferences what we really want and maybe who we are something that is often drowned in the environment Conformity in the way in which family, society, and the people around us often project their own goals and preferences onto us, not because they are bad, but because they think it is the right thing to do, or because it seems right at that particular moment, or because they really care about us. They don't want us to take big risks, and so they often force us to follow a path and a path that is possibly the most acceptable path, but not the path that suits us and that makes us whole. So I would say that failures are a unique and necessary tool for opportunities. Without failures, we will never be able to get where we really want to be. And the most important thing of all is that the opposite of what I am telling you, namely the fear of failure, is what often paralyzes people. They make them not move forward on some paths that they really want to move forward on, deep down in their hearts, because they are afraid of what will happen if they fail. They are afraid of how others will take it, how their family will receive it. their friends and how they will collect it and they themselves are like forcing you to take a dive into the sea headfirst without ever having done it yourself in your life and this thing preventing you from learning how to dive in other words is a terribly unpleasant ugly counterproductive thing and I have the feeling without being able to scientifically document it that Greek society has become a conservative society that pushes children too much on the sure and clear path that excludes risk that excludes failure precisely because it has collected it has developed a very great fear of failure and that is the worst so the main message that I want to convey through this personal discussion of my own past and my own path is that the road to success is always paved with failures it is never linear it never goes in an easy way and anyone who tells you the opposite is lying to you and hiding things from you that may He may not want to admit it himself, but what we should take away from this is that we should never let the fear of failure block us. On the contrary, we should embrace the possibility and possibility of failure. It is a part of our lives and it is something that ultimately, if we handle it in the right way, opens up many more paths than it closes. Thank you very much.