L'échec enseigne la vie- hmmm...
Before you dilate your eyes wide open, lemme clarify writing in French is never as simple as typing and clicking. Failure teaches life. That’s what I used for my pertinence.
Success was never any more normal and nor was failure any more sweeter, before 29th Aug,2008(it took me one month to come out of shell), the day I lost Sports Sec elections of my bhawan. I used to be a modest, risk averse, quite complacent and content guy. I was so happy for the things falling in my way rather than I going out of my way to decide their course. And this was due to the sheer fear of the dreaded word- “loosing”. I never wanted to take any step where the outcome had a ‘may’ or ‘might’ tag attached with it. Be it my trivial, day-to-day activities like playing “chop” shots over smashes on TT table or some of my life changing decisions like choosing DPS, R.K. Puram over rigorous JEE preparation. Or taking a wide detour of Gandhi Maidan (during my school days) to avoid the bunch of hooligans eying to bully passers-by. These examples may sound totally out-of-place for you, but it is where my thinking was to ensure “Less-risk, Less-return” principle. I always wanted the world to think that- “He got what he tried for” rather than “He tried and failed”. Even though it meant aiming for stars and settling for them only, rather than aiming for the moon. To cut the story short, I always minimized the risk factor and compromised with my course of action to make the end result more gratifying.
But, it was until the day, when it took one gult and his 104 odd supporters to make me realise the importance of failure. It took me almost one month of contemplation and self realisation to come out with this “Failure-teaches-life” theory. In between, I read numerous articles which made me realise the importance of taking risk and failure in shaping the future of an individual. One of them was what Anupam Kher wrote in TOI. Here it goes-
I was in Std. X. We used to live in a very small place and there was this restaurant nearby, where we used to go once in every six months or so or on some special occasions. One day, after coming from his office, my father took me to the restaurant although we have been there just one week back. I was amused. He asked me to order whatever I want, even the most expensive dishes. I was very curious to know to what had made my father so generous. I asked him whether he has won some lottery or a prize. He said-“ I went to education board’s office and came to know that you have failed in your exams”. I was shell shocked. I gathered the courage to ask that why is he treating me. He replied calmly-“We are celebrating your failure so that never ever in life you will be afraid of failures”. This was one incident which changed my life completely because I learnt the art of taking failure in right stride.
I personally feel that one should always vie for taking reasonable risk rather than being concerned about the consequence of an unsuccessful attempt. I am not trying to be a Stephen R. Covey or Swett Marden here, I just took a cue out of my own life to delineate the importance of failure(sometimes!!!). Despite asserting the same thing over and over (which I very often do), I don’t think I have been able to convey my feelings to you. I would like to sum all these in my own words-
“Life is total failure without success, but it’s neither a success without failure”
