“There’s no such thing as failure, only new opportunities.”

I started telling myself this in high school when we were finding out about which colleges we got into. I went to a really competitive high school and every day I would see friends crying in the hallway after finding out they got rejected from their dream school. Since then, I decided I did not want to view rejections as failure—I would rather view them as a new opportunity, a new adventure where I would be happier. I used this quote to get me through a lot of my failures—not getting into Stanford (but getting into Berkeley instead); not getting my ‘dream’ jobs out of undergrad but getting the opportunity of a lifetime to become a Product Manager straight out of college; getting laid off from my first job and moving to New York without a job; not getting into any business schools the first time I applied and getting into Owen. During my time at Owen, I realized this quote has made me afraid of failure, so to avoid that fear, I would tweak this quote to “With failure, comes new opportunities.”