The College Essay I Wrote Last Year

The distance is 20 yards – a short walk, or an even shorter journey for an arrow flying at 70 yards a second. However, the yellow circles I need to pierce are the length of my thumb. Slowly inhaling, I set my shoulders square; my right foot juts an inch forward of my left. I gingerly draw my first arrow and place it on the rest. Sweat collects on my palm and moistens my grip. 45 pounds of tension connects the sinews in my calloused fingers to my back as I draw the 17-strand string toward my face. My fingers slide under my chin. With one eye closed, the orange string connecting the corner of my lips to my nose sits next to the frame of my glasses. Breath still held, I park my sight onto the target. Sight centered, the smallest muscle fibers tense across my body. The sound of metal-on-metal, the arrow being pulled through the clicker, tells me I have pulled far enough. My fingers relax. The arrow flies. I exhale.

As an archer, you know that the arrow you shoot at a new distance or with new equipment is going to miss the target more often than not. But you don’t give up. You just change your sight and shoot again. Sometimes the most frustrating things can happen: you’ll run out of space on your sight altogether, losing the target completely, and you might think about trashing your bow. Yet, the problem is often something as small as your fingers, how they're spaced and angled, or maybe a hitch in your follow-through. Perhaps your back tensed up. Then you make one small adjustment – you tune one piece of equipment or technique – and suddenly, everything's right again. So, in archery, success is less of an end than a process, requiring constant re-evaluation, constant re-adjustment. This can be terribly frustrating, but it also means that success is always within reach if you just make the right changes.

Last year I traveled to Amsterdam for the Face2Face competition, a crucible that each year establishes the next generation of top-flight archers. There, I found myself shooting against the best, who surprisingly turned out to be not much different from me – just better tuned. Unsurprisingly, I lost my share of matches; in fact, I posted the lowest score in the competition. And it was embarrassing. Maybe my nerves that day were upset by the presence of so many spectators, or the lofty expectations that came with seeing my Indonesian flag on the wall. I don’t know.

I do know that by giving up archery for an entire month after the competition, I failed to apply the most valuable lesson that archery could teach. In archery, I had learned to readjust: if my bow tilts, I’ll strengthen my rotator cuff muscle and redistribute the weights on my bow; if my wrist develops a crick, I’ll remove my grip and custom mold a new one. Whenever my arrow doesn't follow the trajectory I want, I stop, assess the problem, and find a solution. In the end, if I’m persistent, my arrow will fly true. But here, in the long shadow of my first significant (and very public) failure, I had abandoned the process that I’d depended on.

The essence of the matter is so simple we often overlook it: if something goes wrong, we can fix it. Yet we are often so discouraged by failure we don’t realize that the solution could be as simple as a loose screw or the willingness to try again. I was lucky to have friends and coaches who helped me realize that I needed to come back. Two months later, after a long absence, I placed 2nd at the UK Indoor Nationals. As a result I have an experience to always remind me that I can tune not only my bow but also myself.