Sunday, February 16, 2025

Why failure can be your friend

“The only failure is the failure to learn from failure,” Kevin Everett FitzMaurice.
 
Failure is part of life!

Anyone can make failure their friend by maintaining a positive attitude and using a strategy for learning from their mistakes.

I believe it is important to separate good failures from bad failures.
Good failures happen when, even though you made the correct decision and put commendable effort, you still lost.
Bad failures happen because one did not put enough effort or will into whatever they failed in.

What is failure then?
Wikipedia refers to failure as “the state or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective, and may be viewed as the opposite of success”.

For most of us, the more we fail, the less prepared and able we become to face and successfully tackle the next challenge. But cruel as it may sound to you at the moment, failures will come again.

That is what is going to happen if we view failure as an intensely negative experience. Failure is only caused by bad choices not an individual being bad.

We should view failure as an opportunity to do better and not as a sign to quit the game, but, rather, a sign to go back and read the rules again.

 The moment you see yourself rewriting a test or going for another job interview at a certain company, means that you are not paying attention and have insufficient desire to succeed.
Even though it is somewhat embarrassing to find yourself repeating a class with those who were behind you last year, it doesn’t really matter but shows that you learned from your past failure and are out to redeem yourself.

  Failure stalks us throughout life. Almost everybody has failed in or at something once or twice in their life time.

The best way to remedy it is to approach where you failed by analyzing what happened to determine the cause of a failure and prevent it from recurring.

┬áThe young acclaimed Indian woman, Sulagna Dasgupta, wrote an article about the same issue and said that “by adding two and three for the rest of your life, 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.”

Dasgupta further said 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.

As hard as it might sound, whatever the situation, you must remain calm. One should always apply the phrase that people always repeat that “Learn from your mistakes”. It’s only then that you will see progress. You should take your time.

People don’t recover from serious mental changes such as failure over night; it takes time for them to heal.
Lastly, you should understand that to succeed in life you will need to occasionally fail. Even the most accomplished people haven’t done everything perfectly in their lives.

Sometimes failure is a way to learn valuable lessons that steer a person in a better more positive direction.
Said former US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt:”The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything.”

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