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Teachers or prospective employers during a job interview often ask the open-ended questions designed to make the person think, speak, and reveal something in the process. "Describe a situation where you have not succeeded and what you have learnt from it?" is one such question. In response the person is supposed to tell a very short story about some activity they tried/sought, failed, but still leaned ~something~ as a result.

The thing to remember about such questions is that the story need not be dramatic, the failure need not be traumatic, but that what you learned is emphatic. One interviewee told how she tried to drive a stick-shift under the direction of her dear dad. No matter how she tried, she always had the gears grinding and was more often in reverse than in drive! (It never hurts to inject some humor). She quit when her dad ordered her out of "his" car before she "turned it into a pile of junk". As she recalled the story, she learned it was more valuable to go forward than to go backwards, though she quipped that she told her dad that whenever he needed to go in reverse, she was her gal. But then she paused, and quietly said how her failure showed her a lot about her dad and his passions. He had worked hard to buy his "baby" and when behind the wheel, she could see her father as a striving man, intent to make his way in life, and that his car symbolized all his "drive" toward success. Then she related how she realized she also had her father's passion and ambition as a hard-worker and that even though she "failed" to drive clutch, she knew she would always succeed in going forward because she valued that ambition.

Other interviewees talk about failure to learn a second language... or failure to earn a grade they dearly wanted in a class. The story can be about a normal, everyday event. The most important part is how the experience affected you, how you consolidated it into your personality, and how it became one of the directional factors in your life. What did you "learn from the situation" is more "what did you learn about yourself?"

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15y ago

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