Failure is most jarring when it comes after high achievements

'Ok, that's time. Please stop writing and hand in your papers," the professor said. I kept writing, though, frantically scribbling down some final words with hopes that my answer somewhat resembled the correct solution.

I went into the finance mid-term exam confident, having gotten good marks in the past and having studied the course material thoroughly and having completed practice questions on topics like the present value of an annuity, how to determine the real cost of a loan and the ins-and-outs of corporate financial planning.

However, seconds after I handed in the exam, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach -- one that I had never experienced during high school, my undergraduate years or out in the so-called real world.

There were questions I didn't know how to start to answer, let alone fully solve. And many of the ones I was able to begin, I wasn't sure about my final answer.

I had failed, I thought.

While I no longer had control over my grade on the exam, the experience gave me a chance to reflect on my expected poor performance and take a closer look at this thing called failure -- a topic that few like to think about, let alone study or analyze.

The more I thought about it, I realized that failure is everywhere, happening not only to graduate students but also to everyone from the small-office worker to senior management at multi-billion-dollar organizations.

Take billionaire investing tycoon Warren Buffett. In the late 1980s, he bought a $358-million (U.S.) stake in USAir but then watched that investment spiral downward as a heated fare war began among the smaller American carriers. Five years later, the value of that stake was slashed by three quarters to $89.5-million.

Mr. Buffett's response? "This was a case of sloppy analysis . . . I simply failed to focus on the problems that would inevitably beset a carrier whose costs were both high and extremely difficult to lower," he wrote in his company's 1994 annual letter to Birkshire Hathaway Inc. shareholders. (Of course, since that mistake, Omaha-based Mr. Buffet has made countless winning investment decisions, raking in millions and millions of dollars).

American psychologist Dean Simonton, the author of Greatness: Who Makes History and Why, was quoted in the Washington Post: "Creative geniuses stumble; they trip; they make horrible mistakes. Their highest and most acclaimed successes are constructed on the low rubble of humiliating failures."

In other words, great thinkers and doers are often great failures as well. The difference is, however, that they're able to bounce back from that defeat and keep trying to be successful.

Of course, failures occur all the time to ordinary folk as well and most of us are able to recover and keep trying to do our best.

But it's when there's a proven track record of success that failure becomes so jarring. Whether it's a highly qualified applicant getting passed over for promotion or a previously accurate manager overestimating quarterly sales -- which then causes excess inventory, an annual loss for the division and failure to increase shareholder value -- the high expectations to maintain an excellent record and subsequent failure can feel devastating.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article on coping with failure, researchers offer this advice to "high achievers" who fall short: "Try self-deprecating humour. Do extensive postmortems. Allow yourself to dream big again. If you fear being a two-time loser, create a team strategy, so others share the risk. And ask yourself: What was your failure? Was it not reaching your goal, or not giving your all?"

Indeed, looking at it that way, my failure isn't as much the grade on the exam but the fact that I could have done better. I'm sure that if I had studied more, held team-study sessions and the like, that my performance would have improved.

A week after my exam, the professor walked into class carrying a large tote bag stuffed with our exams.

You could see the terror on my classmates' faces as we exchanged awkward glances, nervously sat up in our chairs and prepared to see how we had fared.

"All in all, the class did fine," the professor said, handing back the exams and explaining that the average was around 74 per cent.

I looked down at my exam and breathed a deep sigh of relief. I passed, scoring 31 out of 50 (or a 62 per cent).

Not great, but not a fail -- at least not officially. However, I did fall short of what I had wanted to achieve on the test.

Still, I'm not going to let that exam mark push me off course for success in my MBA degree. After all, if the Oracle of Omaha can bounce back from a multi-million-dollar mistake, I can bounce back from a lower mark than I had hoped to get.

Richard Bloom is a former Report on Business writer who has enrolled in York University's Schulich School of Business to obtain an MBA. He writes regularly on the career lessons he is taking away from the classroom.