Your Disappointment Can Strengthen Your Mentality

How failure in achieving my goal changed my life.

During my time in secondary school, I was an active member of my school’s public speaking and debate club. I participated in various debate competitions and have attended a lot of Model United Nations Conferences (MUN). The time when I failed terribly was during my second MUN conference that I had competed in, and had high hopes of getting awards. During this conference, I represented Sweden in the UN General Assembly council.

Our objectives, as a council with various nations, were to cooperate with each other and solve the problems of environmental refugees stemming from natural disasters in African nations by passing a UN resolution. Because of my strong desire to acquire awards, I invested a great amount of time and money preparing for the conference itself. I spent countless hours during my school holidays, which I was supposed to rest, researching about the issue, solutions and my country’s stance towards it. I even begged my parents to pay for my airplane ticket to fly back to Singapore from Thailand in order to attend the conference. During the conference itself, I attempted to gain council presence throughout the sessions by lobbying other delegates from other countries and speaking with confidence to introduce new ideas and persuade the council to consider them. I also stayed up until the morning to finish up the resolution with my teammates. After the council session has elapsed, I managed to pass my own resolution for the topic and was extremely elated as I thought that I would definitely win big awards during the awards ceremony.

I could imagine myself going up there, shaking hands with the Singapore ambassador, and receiving that prestigious certificates.

During the awards ceremony, I could feel my heart pounding forcefully inside my chest like a snare drum. My heart beated faster each time other delegates from other councils came up to…