Celebrating Failure

I have been working on a mobile application in Android Studio for the Android operating system, and there was a period of about a month that my progress slowed to a near stand still. Android is notoriously difficult to get to work well, but I was having trouble getting it to work whatsoever. I was trying to get tabs on the bottom of the home-screen that switched between fragments. For some reason I could make no progress. I could easily blame it on the fact that Android is very hard to develop in, but really it was my fault for not putting in the research and trying every permutation that might work. It took me a month, but one day - during a "work session" with my friends, I sat down and actually got sort of mad (because I hadn't made any progress). I tried to limit the task to getting simple tabs that switched between fragments, whereas before I was trying to create tabs on the fly within another mobile application that already had a home-screen. It took me all day to figure this out (it actually was fairly hard to create the tab-fragments, but after a lot of perseverance, I finally got it to work.

From this, I learned - yet again - that we are really capable of more than we think. All of us are simply human, and this entails sub par work ethic in many circumstances. I think that the more that we can improve our work ethic and drive (which means each of us needs to find what we are passionate about and put in the hours to improve our skills), the better the world will be and the more we will achieve. I have seen this multiple times ever since I have started programming - I will start a project, and it will become more difficult than I had originally imagined; I want to give up, but the times that I don't throw in the towel have yielded the best results. In this case, I was stuck on a difficult problem (for me at least it was quite frustrating because every single tutorial on google didn't work), and I finally got the tabs to work after I had been working for so long on them without any progress whatsoever.

I have always hated failure, even been scared of it, but my mom has taught me - and myself, as well, has learned - that failure is how you mature, but you have to learn from it. The most successful, smartest, most creative minds that have, do and will roamed the Earth have always accepted failure and used it to their advantage as well as persevered in times of severe hardship. People like Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo Galilei fought through wars and imprisonment, but their ideas have lived on to this day because they didn't give up - even when they failted; even when obstacles seemed insurmountable; even when all hope seemed lost for their ideas. Albert Einstein among many other geniuses, as those mentioned above, have been doubted, imprisoned, killed, etc. and if they had simply given in, then their ideas, their knowledge, would have been lost to history, and who knows how far back that would have set us - in fact, we might never have caught up to where we are today. Human ambition and perseverance seems to rival that of the universe itself on many levels. There are many, many obstacles, both man-made and those created by the nature of our planet or the universe, but many of them seem overcome-able. All we have to do is learn from our mistakes and persevere.