Overcoming adversity - Understanding expectations: APA and discourse communities - Conforming to standards: APA and the academic environment

APA style and citations for dummies - Joe Giampalmi 2021

Overcoming adversity
Understanding expectations: APA and discourse communities
Conforming to standards: APA and the academic environment

You can turn failure into success by how you choose to respond to it. For example, if you fail a major test, you can accept it and do nothing — or you can talk with your professor, visit your school’s academic success center, and gather information to develop an improvement plan. Unfortunately, students are also motivated by an adult in authority (such as a professor, parent, high school teacher, or advisor) who tells them they can’t do something.

You have overcome adversity to reach your present college academic level, and you’ll continue to face adversity when learning APA. Use your failures as motivation toward success. Like most college students, you can accomplish much more than you think you are capable of.

Consider these names: J. K. Rowling, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Stephen King, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Abraham Lincoln. Are they names of people who achieved innumerable successes? Yes, but they’re also names of people who experienced innumerable failures.

Abraham Lincoln, for example, lost eight elections for public office, including two races for the U.S. Senate. He also experienced personal tragedies such as his mother dying when he was nine, poverty and bankruptcy, debilitating health issues, rejection from law school, and his fiancée dying.

J. K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” pitch was rejected by dozens of publishers, and Einstein was rejected for at least two teaching positions. Henry Ford failed to attract investors after failing in business several times, after which he said, “Apprentice yourself for failure.” But all these icons credit their failures with producing their successes.

Research says that if you don’t occasionally fail, you aren’t trying hard enough and not challenging yourself enough. You most likely experienced failures before college, you’ll also experience failures after college, and you don’t receive an exemption from failure during college. College will challenge you physically, emotionally, socially, and academically. You’ll experience failure with tests, courses, and also people.

But Lincoln, Ford, Einstein, Rowling, and the others named here learned from their failures and used them as motivation to succeed. They learned that failures often precede success and teach life lessons such as these:

· Re-evaluating and revising your approach

· Renewing your determination to succeed

· Problem-solving from a different perspective

· Increasing your determination to discover a solution

· Learning what doesn’t work

A major difference between overachievers and underachievers is that overachievers learn from their failures while underachievers don’t. Recent research showed a high correlation between learning from your failures and transforming failures into successes. Other research showed that overachievers who produced masterpieces also produced a large number of poor-quality works. In other words, Edison produced boxcars of light bulbs that never saw daylight.