TED

 

SCRIPT

Hi I’m Abe and welcome to my ted talk.

I failed, I failed a lot, I failed hard, and you, excluding Mr. McDaniels and Perlman, will fail too.

I have failed at nearly every point in my recent life, let me show you.

In sixth grade it was health

In seventh it was math

In eighth it was LA

In ninth it was math again

And this year I failed to disclose 23 million dollars on my tax forms.

However, I have not failed for nothing, and let me explain why. This year I set out to create Two magic decks, something I had deemed probable and likely. But I only came out of it with one deck, but I realized, that my failures along the way were secretly successful.

Failure is only failure from one angle, now what I mean by this is that if you look at your failure through a different lens it is success. Let me give you some examples.

When I started my project, I was trying to get some questions answered by people who knew the medium way better than I, so I reached out to this great person, Seth, now I emailed him asking a few questions and I waited, and waited, finally I had acknowledged that I failed, and let me tell you I felt horrible. However, when I needed next time to contact this great person, Gavin, my failure at the first mention made me less afraid to fail this time, and what would you know, I got a response this time.

One more example, overall, I failed this project. I failed to create two preconstructed magic decks. However, this project became a reason, for the first time in about a year, to have some of my best friends over at my house. These people who I haven’t seen in person for about a year, all came over and had fun playing with my one creation and just messing around. And I consider those cherished moments enough success for the entire project!

Let me leave you off with something that I know happened last year. Last year as the first batch of report cards came around, I remember sitting in that room that many of you are now sitting in. Mr. McDaniels and Mr. Perlman gave a talk, about straight and round letters. Now what that meant was that up until then, most students had been used to getting straight letters, A’s hopefully. But now the majority of us are getting B’s and C’s. the whole message of that, to me, was. You need to redefine what failure is, where when you get straight A’s a C would be a failure to you, its not. When you look at a broader lens a C is still a success.

You may fail a whole bunch, but as long s those failures mean something to you. You will never truly fail. Thank you.