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　　獨(dú)立寫作題目：

　　To remain happy and optimistic when you fail is more important than achieving success.

　　托福獨(dú)立寫作范文：

　　Modern society places a lot of emphasis on success. Though success is clearly desirable, I think our intense focus on success is unhealthy and counterproductive. People would be better served by learning how to adopt a positive attitude towards failure.

　　First of all, this would allow them to live more fulfilling lives. Studies have shown that the fulfillment brought by success is very fleeting. While you may feel great for a little while after, your mood will quickly drop back to normal levels. The road to success is paved with setbacks; even if you do eventually achieve your goals, if you are unable to experience the failures positively, you will have actually experienced a net decrease in happiness. It is thus important to remain happy and optimistic through failure, because while failure comes inevitably and often, success does not.

　　Second of all, focusing too much on success will hurt your relationships with others, whereas learning to enjoy failure will actually improve your relationships with others. This is particularly true of working in a team. For one class project, I had to work in a team led by someone who only cared about success. We didn’t pursue any unusual ideas, and mistakes were criticized harshly. The team did fairly well, but by the end everybody hated working on the assignment. The leader’s attitude rubbed off on all of us: nobody wanted to take risks, and setbacks weighed heavy on all of us. This was in contrast to my friend’s group, which had a much more open-minded leader. She encouraged the team to test unconventional ideas, and any time they hit a roadblock, they took it as an opportunity to rethink their approach. After the project was over they all remained friends, and they even received a better grade than us.

　　This leads me to my final point: enjoying failure and de-emphasizing success will paradoxically make you more apt to succeed. This is because success hinges on consistent progress, and consistent progress can only come from continuously challenging your abilities and risking failure. Michael Jordan once said that his success came from failing over and over—that he had missed thousands of shots on his path to greatness. He was able to get better because he was eager to see where his deficiencies lay and figure out how to address them. This is the common thread we see in all successful people: they are all happy to fail, because failures open up opportunities for improvement.

　　Most people fail more often than they succeed. Thus, in order to live a fulfilling life, we should learn to approach failure positively. This will not only improve our relationships, but also make success more likely.