The Buddha taught that suffering is a consequence of attachment. He advised that we work on lessening our attachment to earthly attractions and thereby reduce our suffering. Personally, I don’t have any intention of losing my attachment completely to the joys of this world. And I have learned that in fact, to achieve your goals and feel your joys, you must feel the pain of loss as your false perceptions of reality are shattered. Failure and rejection hurt because they alarm the ego. As we attach to phenomena in our lives, our ego begins to grow around them. Our mental patterns become centered around stable, known activities, to which we become more and more deeply attached. I believe in a post-Buddhist take on the matter and I encourage maintaining suspended attachment while you develop, articulate, and achieve your desires.

Here is an example.

I recently failed a certification exam for a coding language. I have been studying SysML intensely for months through reading, practicing, and listening to lectures. All of that was in preparation to achieve the Model Builder Fundamental certification. As I wrapped up my exam, I remember feeling quite confident in my performance and very excited to walk away with a new trophy. Humiliatingly enough, I was met with a score of 58/90 and I was disqualified by 2 points. This hurt and it made me think about the strategies I’ve developed for handling failure in my life and particularly in my engineering career. This is not my first failure, and certainly not my worst.

In 2013, I graduated from my two-year electronics technician program and was eager to dive into college. I enrolled in the local community college in Columbus and joined to 2013 engineering transfer cohort. My plan was to complete two years of elementary courses at the community college and then transfer to Ohio State to complete my studies.  I also had it in my mind that I would be able to work full-time as a technician during my full-time class schedule. This was a mistake and it resulted in my failing the community college engineering program and losing my scholarships.

I was devastated. I had put a large amount of effort into gathering good SAT and ACT scores and thought that I was doomed to never be an engineer. So, I moved to Portland, Oregon in order to have a break from my surroundings. There, I took a job as a cellphone repairman in a mall kiosk. I loved that job but it was clear to me that I would never be satisfied unless I was designing a system. So, I took a personal inventory of why I failed out of community college and I got busy.

Within a year I had already self-taught every weak concept and placed directly into Calculus one (having had failed pre-calc at the last college). My career soared during my undergraduate. I completed with a 3.85 GPA and finished four paid internships during my degree program – including one in France. I was once again riding high and so enrolled for a master’s of science at my undergraduate alma mater: Portland state university. That was during the 2020 pandemic and the subsequent switch to remote school. I was unable to handle my first 600-level course without the structure of school. So, I failed that program too.

That disappointment was even more devestating than the first. And I had to take a break once again from the idea of pursuing my master’s degree.

But it worked out.

I ended up moving to Washington, D.C. and finding a job that I absolutely love. D.C. is far away a better place to live than Portland for a number of reasons. There are more career fields and markets available here. To be frank, despite Intel providing a large number of engineering roles in Portland, they use that size to underpay new graduates. It’s seen as acceptable to graduate with a salary below 70KUSD/year. I wasn’t missing out on much. I even found a high-quality online engineering program at Ohio University and recently finished my semester with perfect grades in MATLAB and VHDL courses.

So here I sit, having once again failed at the peak of my ambition to join the honorable ranks of model-based systems engineers. It’s a familiar feeling that I’ve developed a protocol for handling. I’ve had to because I face a lot of failure in my life (like we all do). But, I have trained myself to be resolute and appreciative in the face of failure. So here is my method for handling failure.

1. Ensure that you are failing as often as you can emotionally handle – The pain of failing or of being rejected is ego death. And we must all practice dying and must be so prepared, despite our desire to ignore that truth.
2. Accept and feel the pain and fear in its totality – Allow your world to collapse around you, if only for a moment, and validate what your heart is experiencing
3. Distract yourself, you are more than what you struggle with – Take some time and practice something you are good at
4. Plan with specificity (and a good reason) how you will try again – Like this:

I will achieve the certification of SysML Model Builder Fundamental. I choose to accomplish this goal because it moves me towards my career, financial, and lifestyle goals and because I feel a deep intrinsic interest in the material. I will continue to take the exam at least twice a year until that certification belongs to me. Nothing, including my own self-doubt, will prevent me from earning that certificate.