Cherish Failure

There’s a huge difference between failing and failing after trying your best. In this post I am going to talk about failing after trying your best. Those who fail without trying their best or not trying at all, they can look elsewhere for justification to fail. This post is not for them.

 I believe that success under favorable circumstances isn’t a measure of life at all. But the success that comes after failing truly makes our character because through our failures we learn, we grow, we experience and we risk. I doubt if anyone has ever learnt to ride a bicycle without falling even once. Or to swim without almost drowning at least once. When we recall our lives we often remember our failures, those moments when everything worked against us, and we crashed, as well as our successes, especially those that came after it was felt that we wouldn’t succeed again. It is our endeavor to rise against the general belief of the society in our inabilities that we prove ourselves. Success and failure are both uphill tasks. Just like climbing.

 You are not automatically a loser if you encounter failure. It all depends upon your attitude. If you simply accepted failure and defeat and gave up on your dreams then perhaps you are a loser. But if you accepted your failure as a stepping stone to success and instead of rejecting or denying it, you embraced it like a friend and learned out of it then you are as much a winner as anyone else.

 Of all the climbs in my life I cherish the most those where I did not reach the true summit, in other words, I failed. That is because in those climbs I learnt much more than what I learnt in those where I succeeded. Success rarely allows us to ponder or reflect or analyze. We are so full of happiness and joy of success that we overlook the finer points, the million things that could have gone wrong but didn’t, the amazing turn of events that happened at the precise moments, which otherwise would have spelled disaster and perhaps death if you are a climber like me. But when we fail, we sit back, often become recluse, and those who have failed despite their best efforts, are more prone to analyze every step of the endeavor, to understand why they didn’t succeed. And then they just return to the arena again with newly learned lessons and renewed vigor and resolve. They might fail again. But that is not the point here.

I believe the measure of a person is in his failures and not so much in his success. Though the world at large might celebrate success and ridicule failure. Yet every high achiever in the world deep within her heart knows that it is her failures that make her truly who she is. Whenever I am asked to name my best five climbs, I always site the five summits I didn’t reach. Sweetness of success is like a bottle of coke, you open it and the fizz evaporates within minutes. Or like a bottle of champagne that so symbolically we pop and spray the emerging foam. That high rushing foam spray is a pretty accurate symbol of success. Because soon the foam spray disappears since after all at the heart of it there was nothing but empty air-filled bubbles. They just burst and die. They hardly live longer than it takes us to finish the bottle. The world too celebrates our success with us but soon the lime light shifts and our success becomes yesterday’s news, old and rejected like yesterday’s newspaper.

 Throughout my life I have met many outstanding achievers, global leaders, celebrities, sportspersons, movie stars, etc and I have always asked them, which did they value more, their success or their failures. Candidly, they all agreed that it is their failures that they always look back upon and cherish to guide their future. 

Like someone once said, the secret to success is to fail again and again till you succeed.