Perfection is Boring
Photo by Riho Kitagawa on Unsplash
by Albert Leo
2. The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?
When reading this prompt, I’m reminded of how the Japanese have a traditional aesthetic called wabi-sabi. This philosophy aims to highlight what is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. Take a ceramic cup—perhaps rather than being perfectly round and glossy, there might be a few imprints and unevenness on its surface. In a similar Japanese philosophy, called kintsugi, one tries to repair broken ceramics with lacquer. In the process of doing so, you don’t try to disguise the mistakes. In fact, even when mended, the golden cracks become a visual part of the object’s history.
What this ultimately boils down to is that perfection is kind of boring. No one really wants to read through an essay that details how a student coasted and fell into a wonderful life. There’s a reason why so many of our favorite stories examine very flawed people who are presented with challenges. It’s in traversing and facing obstacles that we often grow as people.
The value of being so young as a college applicant is that people have sympathy for you because students are often exposed to many situations that they didn’t necessarily choose for themselves. How you react to them isn’t always executed with intellect and grace because you’re still learning.
But by going through challenges, they hopefully allow you to evolve, gain empathy, and develop a set of tools to better tackle future challenges.
That being said, there are some tips I want to relay that are important when writing about challenges:
1) The challenge is just the starting point. Sometimes, people will dwell too long on the setback and failure, and forget to show how they grew from the experience. If you talk about how you struggled with having overly critical parents who constantly devalued your self-worth, and never discuss how you found alternative outlets to be excellent, then your essay risks making you sound like a victim who is just complaining about their parents.
2) If your challenge is just about doing better in school, that might not be the most unique story to tell. The universal factor among all applicants is that they might have struggled academically. If you can imagine, the typical story in that scenario is, I didn’t do well in AP Calc, I got a tutor, I got an A. It’s very predictable, and because so many other people struggle with academics, you want to find other ways to make yours unique.
3) Some students find they are lucky and haven’t experienced challenges in their life. First off, I’m envious of you, but secondly, you still might have had a challenge. Challenges, setbacks, and failures are all relative. This is why talking with an essay mentor can be helpful to show how challenges can be manifested in different ways. Maybe you grew up with the privilege of having parents that afforded you all the extracurriculars and a stable home life. Well, then maybe your challenge is about how the program you were designing to collect data on struggling seniors was inefficient and had to be completely scrapped because of the demographics of your community.
4) With tip #3 in mind, if you still don’t feel like there’s been anything challenging in your life, you can choose another prompt. You can write about positive things too. Just make sure you don’t do so in a way that shows that life was handed to you on a silver platter. There are many ways to color your life with worthy characteristics and layered experiences that don’t have to be solely defined by hardships.
Just as a scar might make a person seem more memorable, as an Essay Narwhal, don’t feel like you have to shy away from the fact that your spots aren’t patterned in the most beautiful way, or that you got into a tussle with a polar bear that left you with a mark. You’ve learned from the experience, and that will only make you better, and as a bonus, more interesting.
