Saturday, November 10, 2012

Art of Failure




Success in life, relationships, education, job, and many other social, or the political system is defined by people. Some people are very good at doing stuff, and some are not. I am like those types of person who is more interested in failures because I believe there is lot to learn from failure than from success. A burgeoning question that needs an explanation has popped up in my curious mind: how much failure can a person handle?

Art of failure shows true color and limitation of humans, and might even sometime hit us hard in this mere mortal life. We humans are fragile, and cannot handle failure(s) competently. We just learn the way through the failure. Some are ready to surrender, and some are not. How should we overcome failures?

Success encourages and motivates a person to move-on in life. However, failure gives us more room for improvement.  If we are serious about the stuff that we are doing, we have to fail frequently. Failure might last longer, and will be more painful to handle than success. 

I think many people agrees on this: “must love what we do.” If we do not love what we are doing, we will abandon hope and might be more exposed to more failure. I think we cannot overcome failure by merely surrendering easily. We have to fight back and keep loving what we are doing now. So, the persistence is the key, and the success, the door. Those people who are keen to unlock the door of success might become successful anyway. 

Although, our idea of failure is somewhat limited. The society sometimes does discriminate between those people who are successful and those who are not. The society we live in is run by very successful people and these successful people (or whatever you want to call them) are not ready to shake their hands with bunch of failures. These people have worked extremely hard to become successful. Once you learn to fail, you will learn to find success. 

There are many examples of successful people who failed several times; eventually, to end up becoming successful in their lives. Take for example, Einstein whose parents thought that he was mentally sick or Gogh who only sold one painting in his entire lifetime. Many famous authors (e.g. J.K. Rowling and Grisham) manuscript got rejected several times, and Walt Disney first animation company went into bankruptcy. So, don’t worry the failure, rather worry the steps taken to improve it. As Edison states, “If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” Thus, there is no magic formula for becoming a successful person in the eyes of society. The mantra is very simple: fail hard, and learn the art of failure i.e. do not just fail once or twice, fail repeatedly.