Failure is an element of life muddled daily in jobs, institutes, housework, and within families. It is inescapable, irksome and a foundation of pessimism. It’s not clandestine that human’s nastiest fear is often failure. But can failure be helpful? When we meet our fears and failures, it rapidly leads to compulsory changes in our lives and can act as a road to despondency or a catalyst to growth. Even, failure creates extraordinary change in men.
A person becomes an easy prey to demoralization and loses motivation when things don’t go as planned. Instead, a person must use the failure as a reset mechanism for his/her perspective, construct a mental modification or embark on a new, much-needed track. Failure is obligatory to shake things up, otherwise, we would coast along cheerfully, but we wouldn’t make any quantum leaps. Failure builds a thick protective cover that can help any person enter the big club without fear. When deal after deal is going through flawlessly and business is on a steep incline, it’s easy to get a big head and become egoistic, but when failure is on the desk it helps in checking, controlling and keeping the person “down to earth” and honest in today’s business world. Those experiencing regular accomplishments may even resort to deceitfulness if it means not losing what they have. Such people become slaves to success and without realization; they’ll do anything to stay on top.
It has been seen that constant success ruined partnerships and friendship, build family conflicts except for a change in the downhill of a bank account. Failure is such a feeling that helps us in remembering our grounds and keeps us in check plus it creates “aha” moments that are just like cracking a complex math problem. If we ask to ourselves, why failure is good to be successful, we come to know that the best victory is the one that’s most complex, the one that needs you to reach down deep inside, to wrestle with everything you’ve got, to be willing to leave everything out there on the battlefield without knowing, until that do-or-die moment, if your heroic effort will be enough. Its self understood that society doesn’t reward defeat neither it is documented in the history books; the only exceptions are those failures that become stepping stones to later success. The best example being is Thomas Alva Edison, whose most unforgettable discovery was the light bulb, which took him 1,000 tries and once he was asked by one of the reporter “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?” He answered in a splendid way that “I didn’t fail 1,000 times; the light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.” Unlike such inventors, a bunch of populace avoids the prospect of failure. In fact, we’re so determined on not failing that we don’t aim for success, settling instead for a life of mediocrity.
When we do make missteps, we gloss over them, selectively editing out the miscalculations or mistakes in our life’s resume. Failure is life’s greatest teacher when we take a closer look at the great thinkers throughout history; a willingness to take on failure is not a new or extraordinary thought at all. From the likes of Augustine, Darwin, and Freud to the business mavericks and sports legends of today, failure is an influential tool as any in reaching great success. So, failure is rightly life’s supreme teacher but unfortunately, most of the public particularly conservative corporate cultures, don’t want to go there, instead, they choose to play it safe, to fly below the radar, repeating the same safe choices over and over again. In today’s post-recession economy, some employers are no longer shying away from failure they are embracing it.
Nowadays, many eminent companies are deliberately seeking out those with track records reflecting both failure and success, believing that those who have been in the trenches survived the battle and come out on the other side have irreplaceable experience and perseverance. So the quickest path to success is to hold an attitude toward failure of ‘no fear. To achieve your personal best, to reach unparalleled heights, to make the impossible possible, we can’t fear failure, we must think big, and we have to push ourselves. When we think of people with this mindset, we imagine the daredevils, the pioneers, the inventors, the explorers because they embrace failure as a necessary step to unprecedented success. But we don’t have to walk a tightrope, climb Mount Everest or cure polio to employ this mindset in our own life.
When the rewards of success are great, embracing possible failure is key to taking on a variety of challenges, whether you’re reinventing yourself by starting a new business or allowing yourself to trust another person to build a deeper relationship. In order to achieve any worthy goal, we must take risks. Of course, the risks we take must be calculated; you shouldn’t fly blindly into the night and simply hope for the best. Achieving the goal or at least waging a heroic effort requires preparation, practice and some awareness of your skills and talents. Although you might fail incredibly, you might succeed incredibly and that’s why incredible risk and courage are requisite. Either way, you’ll learn more than ever about your strengths, talents and resolve, and you’ll strengthen your will for the next challenge. If this sounds like dangerous territory, it can be. But there are ways to ease into this fearless mindset like maintaining a positive attitude, no matter what you encounter, you’ll be able to see the lessons of the experience and continue to push forward. Reading and Listening to motivational stuff of successful people who failed and excelled in their lives. There is a laundry list of celebrities, business tycoons, movie makers, and writers whose failure to success stories has always inspired a surplus amount of people. As we are well aware of the founder of Apple Company, Steve Jobs who was fired from the very company he began, his dismissal made him realize that his passion for his work exceeded the disappointment of failure. Further ventures such as NeXT and Pixar eventually led Jobs back to the CEO position at Apple.
Bill Gates was a Harvard dropout and he co-owned a business called Traf O-Data, which was a true failure but the skill and a passion for computer programming turned this failure into the pioneer of famous software company Microsoft and then 31-year-old into the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. As rightly quoted by “Bill Gates”- Its fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure. This isn’t to say that dropping out of Harvard will make you into a billionaire, but maybe that shiny degree isn’t worth as much as the drive and passion to succeed. Talking about Albert Einstein, he could not speak fluently until the age of nine. His rebellious nature led to expulsion from school, and he was refused admittance to the Zurich Polytechnic School. His earlier setbacks did not stop him from winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. After all, he believed that: “Success is a failure in progress”. Just because you haven’t achieved anything great yet, doesn’t mean you can’t be an Einstein yourself. In this great man’s words “My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.” So, we have to keep finding better ways to run our lives, or someone will take what you’ve accomplished, improve upon it, and be very pleased with the results. So, keep moving forward.
Dr. Abrar Ul Haq Wani, Writer/Ph.D. Scholar; Dept. of Medicine, SKUAST K
