Accepting Failure: After Giving It My All

This post discusses about the recent emotional deterioration that I faced. If you are currently undergoing a challenge, I sincerely wish you to cheer up!

The Disqualification

You may wonder: how big of a challenge can a high school student face? Well, I believe regardless of age, it is natural for people to face emotional challenges from events like failing an exam, receiving rejections, and breaking-up with the significant other. Maybe when I return to this post few years later this could be not much of a big deal. But as a student who loves math and had been preparing an exam for a quite a while, disqualifying from the second stage of team selection for the IMO (International Mathematical Olympiad) hit me hard.

Most students in South Korea preparing for the IMO start from the age of 7. While I wasn’t as intensely prepared as them, I can proudly say that I gave it my all for past 11 months. I genuinely spent many of my time solving, studying, thinking, and reviewing contents and olympiad style problems. After passing the first stage of the selecting process, I studied harder for the second stage. Because I knew that I wasn’t as good as the past representatives, my goal for the year 2025 was to qualify to participate in APMO (Asian Pacific Mathematical Olympiad) by passing the second stage exam of KMO (Korean Mathematical Olympiad). Unfortunately, I was not able to make it.

Overcoming the Challenge

Failing from KMO Stage II has more meaning than just failing for me. I was genuinely worried about my motivation to study further for olympiad math, which I enjoyed a lot. It is very fun to study them, but without a clear goal, it could feel like wasting your time instead of doing more meaningful towards your passion. But the actual biggest challenge was that I was not able to fulfill the expectation of other people. Every time people ask for the result, I need to say that I could not make it. What’s more painful than failing the exam is the fact that I need to say that I failed the exam out loud multiple times for the next few days.

The Positive Mindset

I had lots of extended conversations with my mom. As my mother and life mentor, she as been very supportive and helped me change my mindset. If anyone asks me about the result, I proudly say that I couldn’t make it. Because I have my final chance next year, I will take the failure from this year as my main motivation. Also, why do I do olympiads in the first place? I do them because I like solving challenging problems. Because I love that feeling when I solve the problem that I had been thinking for days and weeks. After all, studying for math olympiad was for me, not others.

I also began to understand silent radiance with the fact that my hard works and myself are just a tiny bit away from getting a spark for huge fire. Although I cannot make the fire right away, I believe that smoke, or effort, is an essential indicator that the fire is actually starting.

The positive mindset to turn failure into a chance and shame into a motivation allowed me to prepare myself for bigger challenges. Moreover, while walking down the street, I realized that staying in distress does not change the result. It is only the positive mindset that changes the failure into chance.

It’s really not the end of the world. I believe nothing is impossible if we have the positive mindset to create the future!