You Fail by Jason Barnett
FAILURE-SUCCESS…The students were challenged to consider the interaction of these two fundamental realities of life.
JASON…makes the case for resilience and determination, with a bit of help from hip-hop’s Kendrick Lamar and history’s Kunta Kinte.
You Fail
What is success without failure? It’s like saying you can’t feel pleasure without pain. Most of your improvement is done through failure. When you fail, you might think you’ll never succeed. But If you give up then, you won’t ever succeed… not because you’re not trying but because you gave up. The worst thing you can do is give up.
How does success feel? How much failure have you endured to come to success? Hold on to those feelings next time you feel like giving up and use your resources to help you. It doesn’t have to be a person but you should have someone to confide in. Don’t blame your failures on others or put your procrastination on something else.
Six hundred thousand people commit suicide every year, that is what giving up is. In some ways, committing suicide might seem better than doing nothing and having no purpose in life. That’s not a life at all. That is not a life worth living. There are probably billions of failure * success stories out there, get inspired and try to do something with your life. Turn your meaninglessness to meaningfulness. You might not know what to do and you don’t have to, just do something, move forward, never give up. Do something until you find your meaning.
Find some time, find some time to do something. Shoot for the stars because, even if you don’t succeed, you reach higher. What matters is that you tried, you didn’t give up and you succeeded in doing something.
Whether you want to be an NBA star, a famous musician, or a well known scientist, nothing is out of reach… for what is the meaning of it if you don’t go for it? Standards are so low nowadays, it used to be that your family supported you and thought you would be someone great no matter what you did. Now it’s just pale. Your family doesn’t support you, you don’t support yourself, and you just live a slow bleak life because you don’t think you’ll reach anything you shoot for, but that’s because you gave up. I’ve heard so many stories about people going to the edge, not giving up, and becoming something great. For every one of those stories, there are at least a dozen stories where they do give up and that is so sad.
There is so much ugly in the world. Even so, tell me how many times you’ve seen an artist turn something ugly into something beautiful. You should do the same. Imagine you’re on a straight narrow road, the wind is at an all time high, cars are blowing past you, and you can smell the carbon emission everywhere. You have no choice but to move forward until you can’t. You’ve reached a mountain so high, you can’t even see the top. If you turn around and give up the feeling of reaching the top, give up the feeling of success and happiness, you fall into a stage of only moving backwards. No mountain is too high for you to climb. Just try. You don’t know what you will find.
“Mornin’ mornin’ mornin, I feel the evils of Luci is all around me, so I went running for answers. Take it in the perspective of Kunta Kinte, everyone wanna cut the legs off em, now he’s got the whole world talking. Kunta, a black man taking no losses.” This is one of my favorite stories of perseverance. Now confide in yourself, persevere, don’t give up, think of what you can do.
SHOUT OUT TPAB
Jason Barnett
October 3, 2025