Undergraduate Blog / Career Development

Success, Failure and the Drive to Keep Creating

 

As Babson students, faculty and staff, we eat, breathe and sleep an entrepreneurial mindset.  We know that this mindset encompasses an approach to life that sets us up for success in whatever we pursue.  It allows us to constantly be creative and be grateful for every failure we experience and grow from.  As the semester comes to an end, I couldn’t help but reflect and connect Babson’s mindset to author Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on success, failure and the drive to keep creating.  The drive to keep creating in the face of failure comes from what she calls home:

 

Your home is whatever in this world you love more than you love yourself.  So that might be creativity, it might be family, it might be invention, adventure, faith, service, it might be raising Corgis, I don’t know, your home is that thing to which you can dedicate your energies with such singular devotion that the ultimate results become inconsequential.

 

For her, home is writing.  As the author of Eat, Pray, Love she talks about the years leading up to her success that were filled with rejection.  Her journey continued with a follow-up to the highly successful Eat, Pray, Love that put her right back into failure.  She learned to tune out the rejection and focus on what she so clearly loves to do: write.  She keeps writing and writing and writing whether the outcome is success or failure – it doesn’t matter.  Her home is writing.

There are countless external influences as you navigate the path through your college years. Family, friends, classes, faculty, staff, co-workers, and supervisors all have some sort of direct or indirect impact on your journey as you determine what your first pursuit will be upon graduating from Babson.  Yes, it is only the first stop of many – of many failures and successes to learn and grow from.  Just don’t lose sight of what you call home.

In Elizabeth’s words, “It’s all going to be okay.”