Failures are the Pillars of Success

Abhishek Ratna in his book ‘No Parking, No Halt. Success Non Stop!’ rightly said that 'failures are indeed the pillars of success'.

Everybody has a goal in their life and in order to achieve those goals we tend to work hard. The journey to success is quite hard where most of the people give up. It’s not because they don’t have the will to succeed but they fear failures in that journey. Failures are an inevitable part of the journey to success. One might be having a smooth course in their path to success, but will that path be any interesting? And I personally think that a rather smooth journey will make things monotonous for some and they might lose the motivation to achieve their goals. A challenging environment and the very idea of failing might in fact motivate a few people. Without the fear of failing, nobody will try to work harder to achieve a certain goal.

Failures help us come out of our comfort zones and try something new. If we keep on fearing failures, then we might never try out new things. If people like Walt Disney, Stephen King, Oprah Winfrey, JK Rowling, Bill Gates?and Colonel Sanders for that matter might have just accepted failures as the final halt in their careers, they wouldn’t have achieved what they have today. It is important to accept failures in life. However, one must look at them as a learning stone. With every failure in life, we learn something. We learn how to do a certain task in a certain way and we even learn what not to do in order to avoid failure in the next attempt. It teaches us to keep going on and be resilient. Without resilience, the failures will keep us bringing down with every new attempt and instead of learning from it we will be rather focused on loosing our self esteem and start reasoning out our failures.

Like I said, failures are inevitable part of human life. Each and every one of us had faced it in some point of our life and it had shaped us in some way or other. I remember when I was in in my sixth standard, and I had failed the Math exam. I always found Mathematics hard for me and more than that I found it to be a boring subject. I was the only one in the whole class who failed in math and I was pretty humiliated by it. I let my failure take advantage here and got distant with the subject even more. I would not even believe that I could solve even the tiniest of the problems. However, I tried to overcome this setback by paying more attention to it. I learnt where I was making the mistake and it took me almost two years to get my basics strong. Once I had that I was amongst the good performers in math. What I’m trying to say is that it is very important to learn from our mistakes. It is indeed very disheartening when we get one. But we can’t let our failures define our future. If we don’t try to evaluate where we lacked attention and what caused the failure, we’ll keep repeating the same mistakes again and again. So, with every step we take, we should carefully examine if it is any different from the previous one.

It has been four months since I had started my first job and quite an experience, I had in those. In these four months, everyday is a new challenge and a learning opportunity for me. Initially, I was so scared to make even a single mistake as I thought it would embarrass me in front of my colleagues. Even while sending an important mail, my hands would tremble. This was my fear of making mistakes which would ultimately lead to failure. I was too scared to make a mistake. But fortunately, I got a great learning and developing environment, which helped me overcome my fear of making a mistake. However, this wasn’t just it. I was still making mistakes and facing failures in my journey. With every one step I took forward, a new challenge or failure would push me two steps backwards. I would feel very low when something of that sort would have happened and lost motivation. Regardless of how, I tried to embrace my failure and learn from it. I evaluated why I am making a certain mistake and tried to overcome every single one of them by following the process. I wasn’t getting success instantly by practicing it but at least I started rectifying my mistakes and avoid any future ones. Had I let my failures become that giant wall which couldn’t be crossed through any ladder, I would have lost this battle. But I didn’t let these obstacles stop me from trying even more rather I tried to transform these failures as a leverage to push me even more towards my goal.

Failures During Interview

We often get confused by not getting shortlisted for a certain role during the interview process with failures in life. Candidates often find it difficult to look out for a better opportunity, once they had got a rejection in an interview. Although, it is very disheartening and demotivating to get a rejection from your dream company or dream job. But it is very important to understand that we should be open to feedbacks and work actively on them. Sometimes getting substandard feedbacks impacts us negatively. No one wants to fail because it is bad for our ego. When your ego is in charge, you will not learn from the mistakes that you have made. You will not be open to other people’s views or see the situations clearly. Therefore, we should let go our ego as it will humble us and will make us evaluate the situation better. There is value in failure. Through disappointments, you will get to know yourself better and you will learn from your mistakes. It will make us rethink, reconsider, and find new ways and strategies to achieve our goals. Sometimes, candidates may also face a rejection in an interview process when their skills are not matching to the position. It is very important for candidates as well as the recruiters to understand whether the current position is fitting as per the skills of the candidate or not in order to avoid further rejections. Moreover, one should analyze whether these disappointments were even actual failures in life. So, in layman’s terms during the interview process, one needs to be open to any type of feedbacks and overcome these failures with working hard on their skills.

We might have not attained something that we wanted or might not have achieved a certain goal because of failures but we do know what we do not want after facing these disappointments. So, we can try to change our ways in order to avoid them and use them in our advantage.

It is true that failures are pillars of success. But let’s make these pillars out of iron.

Image Reference:

• https://mentorsunlocked.com/7-useful-tips-to-avoid-erp-implementation-failure/
• https://yourstory.com/2017/01/discussing-failure-at-interviews/amp