Dr. Roger Russell

By Zixuan, Wang (Chloe)

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” –Thomas Edison

Dr. Roger Russell is the principal of Saint Paul American School for the 2021-2022 academic school year. He became the head principal in September 2021 and has been loved and praised by students and teachers because of his gentle character and strong determination. Every morning, this dynamic duo will stand in front of the doorway every morning. Throughout sunshine, rain, sleet, or snow, they will “fist bump” students entering the building. From there, every student is greeted with one of Dr. Russel’s famous axioms: Purpose, Perseverance, Balance, Self-reliance, and/or Authenticity. Whenever students have difficulties studying or simply want to get some life advice from the principal, he will always friendly welcome them in and offer them a cup of water. This undoubtedly makes all the students feel warm and comfortable, like a sense of community. As a principle, Dr. Russell has accumulated many experiences of failure and success while also producing his own definition of what signifies “failure” and “success”.

Dr. Russell believes that the first definition of failure, simple. It is that failure is not “not succeeding”. There are lots of perspectives to explain what failure is, but success indeed comes from unremitting efforts and continuous progress. As long as we attempt it, we will eventually reach it. By learning past mistakes in the failure, anything is possible. However, the moment we stop trying to succeed, and surrender to our weakness, we accept that we have consequently failed. This is what Dr. Russell suggests to students when they encountered failure again and again: “Keep trying until to reach your goal.”

In this case, many people will think that we can only succeed or fail; however, failure and success are not opposite things. In Dr. Russell’s eyes, failure is a fantastic thing for people! Through encountering failures, there must be thousands of times we want to give up or try to find another thing as our goal. Yet, there are still people who are willing to put their efforts into something, whether they are confident in it or not. That is precisely how people learn from failures. Once they overcome these difficulties, they will likely reach another mindset to become a huge success. Therefore, failure is also a great learning and growing opportunity because people will stop and think more about their failure when they failed, whereas people tend to ignore the parts of success that still can be improved.

“I wouldn’t say ‘failure’ is a common thing, but I think ‘giving up’ is, as well as ‘not succeeding.’” Dr. Russell said. To put it into layman’s terms, it seems like failure is not common. People usually avoid mentioning their struggles when trying to reach success. However, we grow from having the courage to admit our difficult past. If we see things from a different point of view, failure won’t become a shameful topic to mention. It will then become a medal for those who bravely defeated the hardships, gaining triumph in the process. When we are viewing a cup from the cup, we can just see the circular bottom of the cup, which is what we saw when we reach success easily. However, failure leads us to see every aspect of our strengths and weaknesses.

Dr. Russell provides us with a personal example to illustrate this point. 15 years ago, he was indeed frustrated when he tried very hard, but failed. One of his friends who was also struggling shared with him an exercise technique people use 30 years ago, called isometrics, an exercise without movement. By doing this exercise, people can just stand straight in front of the wall and push the wall as hard as they can. The wall, of course, will not move, but it is ourselves who strengthen our body by pushing the wall. The fact that we didn’t move the wall is not a failure, but we gained success from learning how to be stronger through the action; thus, becoming stronger.

In conclusion, will you consider not moving the wall a failure, or do you believe that you achieved success by strengthening your body? It is all about perspective. As Dr. Russell believes, “Success isn’t just about moving the border, it’s about getting stronger.” Next time, when you are exhausted and considering giving up, think about what you learned from this failing process. From then maybe, just maybe, we can try another method or route to reach success. All in all: Never. Stop. Trying!