Failure Is Your Friend, Not An Enemy
Posted: Friday, August 01, 2008
by Sulagna Dasgupta
Love in India
Our topic for today is one of the most talked about ones in the whole self-help field. So we all know something about it. Some of us know a LOT.
Whatever the case, I'm sure every one of us has at least heard of the basic lesson that all of this discussion preaches-"Thou shalt not give up", even if the path to success is punctuated with regular failures.
Now, let me ask you, have you put this bit of wisdom to use?
Oh yes, you have. It was only because you knew that you must not pay attention to your failures, that you could get your act together once again after failing that test/losing that job/getting negative feedback from your boss/being jilted by your partner
That's really encouraging.
But the memory hurts, doesn't it?
What if that happens to you again? ("Don't you try to put me in a negative state of mind!"
)
Or something else goes wrong tomorrow? ("Haven't I already been through enough?")
I know many of you will wince at the prospect.
For most of us, the more we fail, the less prepared and able we become to face and successfully tackle the next failure.
But cruel as it may sound to you at the moment, failures will come again.
And again.
You of course know the story of Thomas Edison failing 5000 times before he successfully invented the light bulb. You remember it as an inspiring story regularly cited in self-help literature. Can you remember exactly what he had said when the young reporter asked him about how he could continue to try when he had failed SO MANY times? He said, "Young man, I have not failed 5,000 times . I have successfully discovered 5,000 ways that do not work and I do not need to try them again."
Look at the HUGE number-5000!!
That's more than the number of times the rest of us have tried-let alone failed to do- anything put together. Now do you think he could have gone on and on and on, if he'd regarded failure as a nasty but unavoidable' part of life? Read carefully what he said. Did he say, "I went on trying cause I couldn't let my failures come in my way to success."?
Did he say, "I knew failures can't be completely avoided in life and hence you've to ignore them and plough on if you are to succeed."?
NO.
True, he didn't let his failures slow him down. (As you rightly know you shouldn't.)
But he looked at them, not as failures, but as achievements! He saw every failed attempt of his as another step towards success. For him every one of them was a crucial learning opportunity-every one of them taught him yet another way which wouldn't work and which wouldn't have to be tried again.
This subtle but decisive difference in the way we look at our failures decides how successfully we'll be able to deal with our future failures, and hence how successful we'd be eventually.
Come to think of it, will you be able to endure even the prospect of spending your life with someone who you perceive as a threatening bully? Someone who makes you cry and makes you feel miserable? Now imagine you are married to that person, and there are no divorce lawyers!! So what do you do when you can't change the world? You change yourself. Since you can't change your partner, the only thing you can do is change your attitude towards them. If you continue to view them as a bully and to be afraid of them, every day you'll wake up with a little less energy to plough on.
This is what happens when we view a failure as an intensely negative experience. We're all married to failure and are going to remain so for the rest of our lives. There's no one-absolutely NO ONE-who's never failed. Oh yes, there's always that nice foolproof recipe for not failing-not trying. Go on adding two and three for the rest of your life and there you are! You've completely eliminated the slightest chance of failure. But since that is not what most of us aspire to do, we have to face failure, and we've to do it on a regular basis. So as long as we continue to have a negative attitude towards failure, we keep sapping our own energy. We make it more difficult for ourselves to tackle and exploit the next failure successfully. (Sounding weird? Read on.)
Failures are not only unavoidable, but also essential to success. Every failure teaches us something, without which we'd never be able to embark on the next step to success. In this way, every failure gets us nearer to perfection. So a failure is essentially an opportunity and can be put to practical use, if only we have the right mindset to treat it as such.
Enough talking. Now it's time for some action. I want you to act NOW.
I'll meet you again soon with a lot of fun+learning stuff. Bye till then, and meanwhile happy learning!
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