Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “No man is defeated without until he has been defeated within”.
Failures are an indispensable and integral part of life. In a layperson’s terms, failure simply means “lack of success”. When we think about failure, we tend to think of things in a negative light. But those who have known true failure, wouldn’t quite agree with this perspective. A failure can be viewed as the climax scene of a movie - it induces stress and puts the protagonists in a dilemma, but that’s what makes a great movie! If taken in an optimistic light, failures make a man strong, gallant and ready to face the world. Great men and women have faced innumerable failures in their lives; Jesus was executed, Mohammed deported, and Gandhi and Nehru jailed.
Society doesn’t reward defeat and you won’t find many failures documented in history books. The exceptions are those failures which paved the way for later success stories. Such is the case with Thomas Edison, whose most memorable invention was the light bulb which purportedly took him 1,000 tries before he developed a successful prototype. “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?” a reporter asked. “I didn’t fail 1,000 times,” Edison responded. “The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.” From the likes of Thomas Edison to prominent business mavericks and sports legends of today, failure is as powerful a tool as any in reaching great heights. But unlike Edison, many of us avoid the prospect of failure because of the way that we have been conditioned about this concept. In fact, we’re so focused on not failing that we don’t aim for success settling instead for a life of mediocrity.
When we do make missteps we gloss over them, selectively editing out the mistakes in our life’s
résumé. “To many in our success-driven society, failure isn’t just considered a non-option: it’s
deemed a deficiency”, says Kathryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. “Of all the things we are wrong about, this idea of error might well top the list,” Schulz says. “It is our meta-mistake: We are wrong about what it means to be wrong.”
“By every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew”- these are the words of JK Rowling; the author whose book series has been translated into 73 languages, sold millions of copies and
accrued over $200 billion through movie adaptations and sponsorships. Her Harry Potter books
were rejected innumerable times before they were actually published. Had she given in to these
failures, this unemployed, single mother would not be even capable of dreaming about the million dollar fortune she possesses today.
In a nutshell, failures indeed are stepping stones to success but if one is pessimistic, it won’t take
time to turn them into stumbling blocks. Failures must be viewed as a process to regress upon
mistakes made and to take corrective action. They are indicators of underlying problem areas in
our method of performing a certain task. One must not shy away from failures, but embrace them.
Each failure must be taken as a learning point. The principal part of these learnings should be to
experiment, to produce various anecdotes so that the next time one fails, it shouldn’t be due to the same action. Thus, failure is the greatest teacher a man could possibly get!
(March 15, 2019)
- Isha Gupta
BA (Hons.) Economics
(Edited by Debaruna and Pallavi
Art curated by Pallavi)
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