When a two year old toddler begins to walk for the first time, his parents jump with joy to see their tiny tot’s first big achievement.
The parents disregard the fact that in the process of beginning to walk, the child may have to fall many a times but would gradually start walking on his own.
The focus here is not on the inability of the child to start walking steadily right from the beginning, which they know would never happen, instead they focus on the possibility of the child picking himself up and starting to walk again.
This is a simple instance of success and failure, wherein after repeated attempts of failure by the child to walk all by him, finally tries to do it out of sheer determination and succeeds in it.
The idea here is to explain the term failure in the most relevant manner.
Failure can be explained in so many ways. Failure can be seen as not being able to achieve success in the tasks performed.
It also means that one’s expectation could not be met in the desired way and hence can be considered a failure.
Failure happens when something breaks down unexpectedly, when a machine is unable to perform its operations in the designated manner or when it provides an outcome in an unexpected fashion.
Failure is perceived in different ways by different people according to their nature.
Some see failure as the end of the road and choose a different road leaving behind the road already travelled.
Some others see failure as a temporary low phase and put in efforts to rise again and see success later on.
Some just lock themselves with their failures, not being able to accept the truth and sit with it for ages to come.
Possible reasons that lead to Failure
Failure can occur anywhere and to anyone. In the most common example, we may consider a person trying to start his vehicle routinely to go to his workplace.
When the vehicle started normally every other day, there was absolutely no problem faced.
One day suddenly when the vehicle does not turn on, there is a failure from the part of the vehicle to be unable to get started.
The rider of the vehicle then looks out for alternate means to reach his office and probably when he comes back from his work, he might consider getting his vehicle repaired.
Here, the vehicle showed up failure when it was tried to start, not because it was angry on the rider.
The reasons that led to the failure to start up could be many. May be the rider neglected certain warning signs indicating slowdown of the vehicle.
May be the rider did not bother to maintain the vehicle properly. May be the vehicle faced with a sudden mechanical glitch, that was unexpected by both the vehicle and the rider.
Whatever the reason be, but a failure does not happen all by itself. It is a clear phenomenon and behind every failure lays a list of possibilities that eventually led to it.
Exploring some generic possibilities about why people see failure in their lives, the list could be as big as the universe itself. Every person has different reasons why he met with a failure in a certain thing he did.
Exploring those reasons and working on them to avoid repeating them in future will avoid meeting with failure for the same thing, another time. Let’s say a student failed in his board exams.
The list of possibilities for his failure could be many. The most obvious reason may be that he did not study up well.
May be the child’s concentration was poor and so he could not focus on what was really required for his exams. May be he had health issues.
May be he forgot to write the relevant answers in the exam leading to his failure. There could be so many possibilities.
What happens right after the student gets to know that he has failed in his exams is the next question in line.
The student obviously feels dejected and if his parents understand their child and are supportive enough, they will first discuss the same with their child in a calm manner.
The student at this stage feels a little comforting feel from his parents but would still be wondering why he was chosen to see the failure he just met with.
If a positive environment is created for the child, very soon he would start looking out for reasons that led to the bad results.
If he is doomed in negativity, he would forget the whole world around him and dip himself in darkness not knowing what to do next.
Accepting Failure
Why is the word ‘failure’ such a dreaded thing in our minds, such that everybody wishes to taste success without meeting failure on their paths?
Let us again take the instance of a little toddler beginning to walk. Why does it so happen that the child keeps baby steps at first and then slowly learns to walk all by himself, why is that the act of walking is not a one-shot effort, but a continuous self-effort that the child puts in unconsciously and gathers pace?
The explanation is quite simple. When the toddler is learning to keep baby steps, he falls very often. But the toddler never stops himself from getting up and trying all over again.
He keeps repeating this act and finally manages to walk all by himself. This repeated act of getting up and falling down is also accompanied by a measure of self confidence which the child receives by himself at every stage of his fall.
Why can’t we adults apply the same act of getting up whenever we fall down, once we are grown up?
The child doesn’t see success easily. After multiple repeated efforts he finally manages to walk, but the catch here is, at no point does the child ever stop trying to become successful.
The repeated attempts to finally make it happen is what takes a person out of the failure zone and gets him working towards his success zone.
This can be elaborated thus. Whenever we find ourselves in a bad state of failure, assuming we have failed in exams compared to our friends, it is fine to feel bad about it for some time.
After a while, we should start thinking why we actually couldn’t be successful in our exams.
After finding out the reasons for us, the next best thing to do would be to accept our failure and take self responsibility for it. Accepting failure in itself is a very big step which guides us on what is to be done next.
Sitting with failure, cursing ourselves for not doing things the right way, blaming others for our failures etc does not solve the problem in any way.
Marching ahead and preparing ourselves to think forward is simply the way out. Write down possibilities that may help clear exams in the next attempt. Prepare strategies to work effectively.
Marching towards Success from Failure
It is very clear that sitting down with failure leads us to nowhere. Learning from past failures and not repeating the same mistakes again lead us towards success.
Failure is not the end of the world. If we have failed in a certain attempt, we should consider it as a learning step and rise up the ladder to make another attempt.
All attempts made may not be fruitful. Success is not guaranteed immediately after an episode of failure.
When we say a person is successful in his chosen field, it certainly doesn’t mean that the person has never come across failure in his life.
It only means that the person had determination to rise up whenever he had downfalls and finally managed to taste success.
The most successful people in this world are the ones who have met failure the maximum number of times in their attempts.
But out of their grit, they stood up tall and strong, learnt from their mistakes and worked things in the right way. There is always another chance given whenever we go wrong or whenever we saw failure.
Realizing the pain of failure tells us how difficult it is to achieve success in life.
A person clearly knows the significance of success when he knows the importance of failure in his life. Let us all use failed attempts as steps to reach the doors of success.
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