My Thoughts On Failure
“egbọ́ntolú you no fit win anything jor”
That was the last thing I heard as I walked out of the university sports ground, the taste of disappointment sharper than the evening air. Seven penalty kicks had brought us to the edge. One final shot stood between everything I’d sacrificed and nothing at all.
The seventh man stepped up to the spot. He ran with forced conviction, and…..
(I’ll come back to that.)
Since my first year as an undergraduate though I’m still not sure how, I found myself coaching my class football team. Every year, we earned the same label: the best football-playing class. Yet every year, it ended the same way without a trophy to prove it.
Eventually, frustration outweighed loyalty. I left. Joined another department’s team. Within two months, we won something. My old class? They finally lifted gold under a different coach. Even then, I couldn’t walk away completely. My eyes were fixed on the bigger picture: leading our combined departmental team to victory in the faculty games.
The previous year, as assistant coach, we crashed out in the quarter-finals. Now, in my final year, I knew it was my last chance to steer the ship to glory. So I gave it everything.
Nights researching drills, formations, ways to instill belief. Days skipping classes, missing gigs, writing to you only when I could find the energy. All so that, this time, the sacrifice wouldn’t be for nothing. That the story would finally end with victory.
One last tournament. Maybe, Just maybe this would be it.
But it wasn’t.
The seventh penalty taker exhaled, ran up, and struck the ball cleanly.
Off the side post it went.
Elimination. That bitter taste again.
This Experience Opened My Eyes To Something
We often times love to romanticize failure. Learn to enjoy it. See the positive in the negative. Everything happens for a reason.
These words even though they are valid, are easy to say when you’re not the one who stayed up all night planning, or when you haven’t bet your final year on something you believed could be different. This experience opened my eyes to how narrow my world view has been all along. I see the concept of failure from a wider point of view and here are new lessons I am taking along.
Failure doesn’t always teach you something new.
We like to think that every setback has a hidden lesson tucked inside, waiting to be unwrapped. But sometimes, there’s no epiphany at the end. Sometimes failure just sits with you, heavy and silent, reminding you that life doesn’t always pay you back for effort. You can plan meticulously, train harder than everyone else, sacrifice things you cared about—and still walk away empty-handed. It doesn’t mean you did everything wrong. It just means life isn’t obligated to reward you because you tried and that is just how it is, what you can do is dust yourself off and go again at the very least if you hit a wall with a sledge hard enough for long enough at some point it would break.
Perspective takes time.
When you’ve poured yourself into something, people are quick to offer neatly packaged wisdom: It’s just a game, You’ll see the bigger picture soon. But perspective is a luxury that only shows up after the pain has had its say. In that moment, nothing could dilute the sting of watching the ball ricochet off the post. No amount of reframing could make me feel proud or philosophical. Sometimes you have to sit in disappointment without trying to turn it into something useful. Feel all of the emotions for what it is.
Identity gets entangled with outcomes.
When you care deeply, the line between what you do and who you are blurs. I wasn’t just coaching a football team. I was trying to prove something about myself: my ideas, my leadership, my ability to turn potential into results. Losing felt like a verdict on my worth. Like all the sacrifices were evidence that maybe I just wasn’t enough. That kind of identity investment makes every setback feel personal, no matter how much you pretend it isn’t. The key is to not allow that entaglment happen. But again this perspective shift isn’t as easy as it sounds, it takes time.
Letting go is harder than starting over.
It was easy to leave my class team when I felt stuck. It was even easier to throw myself into a new project and succeed. But no victory fully erased the sense of unfinished business. Even after winning trophies with another group, I still carried the question: What if I’d stayed? What if this time had been different? Starting over feels productive. Letting go is admitting you’ll never know and that sense of uncertainty hunts you forever.
Near-success hurts more than clear defeat.
If we’d been outclassed from the first whistle, I might have accepted it faster. But when you stand inches from the finish line one penalty away from rewriting the narrative the loss feels crueler. Because it means you were capable. You were close enough to taste it. And still…not quite enough. That proximity makes it harder to heal because you keep replaying the moment, convinced that a single tiny decision could have changed everything.
All I’m really trying to say is that failing hurts. Sometimes it hurts in ways that make no sense, no matter how much you try to reframe it. Sometimes there isn’t a deeper meaning or a silver lining. Sometimes you just lose, and it feels unfair.
But if there’s one thing I’ve come to believe, it’s that this is the price of doing anything that matters. The difference between the people who eventually find themselves on top and everyone else isn’t that they never feel this pain. It’s that they find the grit to go again—and again, and again—until something finally changes. Until the outcome finally matches the effort.
And so, this is where the story ends: a ball glancing off a post, a final year spent chasing something I believed in, and a reminder that caring deeply doesn’t always end in applause. But I’d rather care and lose than never care at all.
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