Defensive Driving School

As part of my daughter's driver education training, she signed up for a defensive driving and crash avoidance course. A parent was to attend with her so I had that duty yesterday on a Saturday morning. I was not excited about taking the course but knew that it would be good for my daughter's education. As it turned out, I learned a lot from the course and feel I am better prepared for my own driving.

The course involved a number of exercises in the car to give you the skills and knowledge to avoid an accident in different situations. The exercises became increasingly difficult as the morning went on. In the latter exercises, all of the students (myself included) failed on the first few attempts. As we practiced, however, all of us became proficient in a driving skill that would help us avoid an accident.

The instructors were asking us to do hard things and they knew we would experience early failure. If they had let us get away with failure, we would not have learned these important skills. Through practice and repetition, we eventually succeeded.

There are many important lessons we learn from failure. It is only through failure that we learn hard things and achieve success. We should celebrate failure if we don't give into it and use it as merely a stop on our journey towards something great.

Our politicians need to learn that a society that tries to make it so everyone succeeds without failure is a society that will fail. Only through the consequences of our failures will we learn to overcome our weaknesses and make them strengths. Americans throughout their history have risen above failure to accomplish great things. The government should stop trying to take care of us by protecting us from failure but rather allow us to succeed which will only come through our failures.