Failure. It is considered to
be one bad evil thing to do. Like the worst thing a person can do. As if this
is the world’s biggest evil. As if nothing can be more bad than failure. But what
exactly is failure and why do we fear this thing so much? Why is it considered
such a bad thing?
I think all of us have heard
of the age old saying that says, “You learn from your mistakes”. We think that
doing mistakes are okay as we learn from them. But failure is bad. You learn
from failure too, so why don’t we ever say, “You learn from experiencing
failure”.
Yes, I know, and agree, that
failure is not a good place to be. Not only does it wreck our own minds with
lack of confidence, lack of enthusiasm and lack of self esteem, it may also
wreck relationships if we keep on ridiculing the person who has seen hard
times, instead of providing the encouragement they need. My personal stance on
failure is different than the mainstream view. I don’t view failure as being
something that is negative or bad. I think failure is actually a good thing. Failure
is a learning experience. It opens our eyes to new horizons.
What got me thinking about
this topic and motivated me to write on it was a conference that I attended
back in December. The topic of the conference was entrepreneurship, and they
had a whole segment dedicated to the concept of failure because unfortunately
the vast majority of the people who do engage in entrepreneurship experience
failure. The speakers of the conference felt that failure should be embraced
and accepted rather than feared, and that idea kind of got hold in my mind as I
recalled the times when I personally experienced failure and how I grew and
learned from those experiences.
People, from day one, are indoctrinated
to fear failure. To avoid failure like the plague. Kids are sometimes afraid to
tell their parents they failed an exam. They falsify results to make an A minus
look like an A. Like I know of a case where a girl was a position holder in her
university class, yet she was too afraid to tell her parents her grades because
she had scored fewer points than the parents wanted. Or the case where someone
was forced to repeat their math O Level exam to convert an A minus into an A. In
this way, we do not teach kids to love success or to work hard and to strive
for success. Instead we teach them to fear failure. Which is totally wrong “training”.
If a person is afraid of failure, will they take risks? No. If a person is
afraid of failure, will they embrace new ideas? No. If a person is afraid of
failure, will they ever reach their full potential? No.
Without the possibility and
experience of failure, there can never be success. Only if things are tried out
will you find out what you are good at and what your true talent and true potential
is. If people are constantly going to be like, “Lets play it safe and stay in
our safety nets only”, we won’t have cell phones even! Because when cell phones
were invented, the guy who invented it was told to not even bother with his
invention because nobody is going to want it. But he stuck with it despite the
possibility of failure. The rest is history. We all know what is the present
condition and future potential of the cell phone.
Instead, the message that we
put across should be, “Tough times are a part of life, there is no avoiding
them, unfortunately. And success is measured by how to embrace those times and
you turn them into learning experiences. Because failure is not the act of
going down, failure is the act of going down.”
If failure was feared so
much, we would not have a Thomas Edison or an Albert Einstein. Why? They were
labelled as failures. They didn’t give up. They refused to be defined by
failure. And look what became of them. They became the world’s greatest
scientific minds the world has ever known. Thomas Edison had 100 failed
attempts. Albert Einstein’s fifth grade teacher said that he can never pass
math. If they feared failure, the potentials of their minds would’ve been
locked in forever never to be seen of or heard of.
