Failing your way to Success

Failure is that one word that scares the sh** out of me. I am sure it does the same to a lot of us. It’s not very difficult to guess why is it so?

My bet is its due to the fact that society rewards only and only success. It views people who fail as miserable. It highlights stories of successful people only, no matter how many failures they might have encountered.

Beyond this, we are hammered with all our life that the society will acknowledge only your success so you better not fail if you want to be famous or known or recognized in the society.

How do we change this? My idea is it starts at home. Accept that failing is okay, normalize it and learn. Treat failures as value-adding lessons, it teaches you things that success will never teach you.

The pain of failure is sweet if you accept it, learn from it, and give a better attempt to it next time. How do people become successful? by failing and trying again and again until they get what they want.

Let me share a story with you. A boy from a small city in the,hope of better education and standard of living moves to a metropolitan city. He starts studying and by the end of term 1 he fails in 2 subjects in a course like B.com.

Little did he know that this was just the beginning of failures. He had never failed in his entire life. The next term he fails in one more subject and the previous two subjects he failed in still does not clear them even after a reattempt. Next comes a competitive exam for a professional course.

It’s not difficult to guess he fails in that exam too. In the second year he clears the college exams but the professional exam well he fails again and one more time (total 3 times) until he finally gives up the course.

Now obviously, he is in the middle of the crisis and knows nothing about what he is going to do in his life. Failing 5 times in a row at the age of early 20’s is too much to take. Somehow he gathers courage and appears for another entrance exam and gets admitted to a post-graduate program.

This turns out to be a defining moment in his life where he finds something that he would really want to do for the rest of his life and someone he would want to be.

He attempts another professional exam and guess what he clears it this time and attempts for another level and clears that too

A clear case of how he failed his way to reach somewhere that he belonged. The failures were so important that without them he wouldn’t have succeeded.

When it comes to life failures are inevitable. Accept them graciously because without them you’re not going to learn the important lessons in life.

It is the same when it comes to investing in the stock market. It is important to be ready to fail in a few cos you invest in. Hardly anyone has escaped failing in the stock market. A few of your investments will go down the drain, few will make you little money and a few would give exceptional returns.

Getting rid of the failed investments is the second most important thing, first is learning from the mistakes that caused failed investment. You should have no shame in accepting that you were wrong regarding a stock and it has caused you money.

I would go one step ahead and suggest you make a diary where you note all your failures, the reason, and the lessons. Record everything including how you felt after realizing that the investment failed.