I’ve been a student my whole life, and I’ve been tutoring at First Education for about a year now. I feel I owe my current success in all spheres of my life to my confidence – whether this be taking a student through HSC questions, approaching someone random in public, or even just keeping on top of my own current studies.

However, this confidence didn’t magically appear overnight. One can compare this to a group of engineers attempting to design a suspension bridge – nowadays, designs are planned carefully in accordance to accurate scientific measurements of the surrounding environment, engineering standards, and regulations. This ensures the longevity and safety of the bridge for people to use. However, some of the engineering considerations behind these successes have come off the backs of real tragedies.

The Tacoma Narrows bridge disaster in 1940 highlights such a tragedy, where the slender girder-supported deck reached catastrophic collapse due to torsional (twisting) effects from winds blowing through it. This disaster ultimately failed to consider the impact of aerodynamic forces acting on it; highlighting a need for the proper testing of suspension bridges in wind tunnels, which ensures bridges of the kind today don’t suffer a similar fate. For every Golden Gate Bridge, there are two Tacoma Narrows disasters that come before it.

This is an exaggeration, and an oversimplification, of course. But applying this analogy to my own academic and tutoring journey, my success has come off the back of resilience in the face of hardship – whether it be losing a student, or failing an assessment I worked hard to pass.

But personal progress is non-linear. Sometimes it’s a walk in the park while others you trip and stumble a few steps backward. I never know at the time that things will get better. But they do. They always do. My current confidence, especially academically, is built not off failure itself, but resilience and perseverance in the face of failure. In each small battle a victory is earned, for I take on new lessons to apply each time after it.

So if there is anything you can take from this, please let it be that failure is part of the process of success. Keep trying, because soon enough, you’ll be confident enough in yourself to build your own “Golden Gate Bridge”.

Zac Markovina