In this excerpt from her All-School Meeting remarks, Rori Nisi ‘27 spoke to her fellow classmates, reflecting on the unexpected lessons that came with not winning and why failure can sometimes teach us more than success.

“When Mr. Gappa asked me to talk today, I wasn't sure where to start. I knew I was going to talk about Economics, but just talking straight economics can get really boring, so it made me think about what I've learned that actually goes beyond just economics. And I kept coming back to the idea of failure.

Last year, I participated in the Sabin Prize. My team spent the spring trimester developing and researching a product and turning it into an actual business idea to then present to a panel of judges. Thinking back on the hands-on process and the formalities of dinner and the competition itself, it was probably the most fun experience I've had in a class in a long time. Through that process, my team and I eventually created a product that we genuinely believed in. And when the time came to present, we didn't win.

Obviously, that wasn't the outcome we wanted. We had put a lot of time into something and wanted our work to be validated by winning. And when we didn't, it was easy to look at the result and think: ‘We failed.’ But this year, in my second year of economics, we've been reading a book called Thinking in Bets. One of the ideas immediately introduced is that a good decision doesn't always lead to a good outcome—and a good outcome doesn't always mean you made a good decision. You can lose and still be right. And you can win while being completely wrong. It's a pretty simple idea, but it’s often overlooked.

We tend to judge our decisions backwards. If something works, we assume we did something right. If something doesn't, we assume we did something wrong. But it doesn't really work that way. You can study incredibly hard for a test and still get a question about the one thing you didn't understand. You can play your best and still lose the game. But you could also barely study for a test, guess a few times, and walk away with an A. The outcome matters, but it doesn't tell you everything about the decisions that got you there.

Looking back at Sabin, we didn't win. That's a fact. But losing doesn't erase everything that went right. We still took an idea and turned it into something real. We learned how to build a business around a service, how to work together when we disagree, how to present something we believed in, and how to adapt when something inevitably wasn't working. At the same time, losing gave me something winning probably wouldn't have. It forced me to ask why.

What could we have done differently? Which decisions were good, even though they didn't produce the outcome we wanted? Which decisions actually weren't good? And, most importantly, what was outside of our control? I think that's what economics has taught me more than anything else.

Economics constantly asks us to look beyond an outcome and understand the quality of the decisions behind it. It asks us to think about tradeoffs and what’s outside of our control while making decisions. Especially as a senior, there are a lot of moments when it feels like everything has a clear outcome attached to it. There's a grade, an acceptance or rejection, a win or a loss, an award or no award. It's really easy to let those outcomes become the way we measure ourselves. Failure doesn't mean that everything you did was wrong. And success doesn't mean everything you did was right. What matters is controlling what you can, putting in your best effort, and not letting a bad outcome take away from everything you did to get there.

Last year, my team lost; that was the outcome, and the decision we were then proud of felt useless. At the time, I saw that as just a failure. But that failure was probably one of the most valuable things I could have gotten out of Sabin. Because, yeah, failure feels awful. But you have to keep making the best quality decisions you can, even when it feels like nothing is going your way. There are always things you can’t control, but you can make sure you're proud of the choices that got you there. And when you think back about that time, that’s what you’ll really remember.”

Rori Nisi is a four-year senior from Poughkeepsie, New York.