Saturday, October 28, 2006

A Seven Letter Word

It is all about a seven-letter word, which we are going to ponder. I've experienced it many times in my childhood, before even knowing the word. It was in my primary school, when I heard of this word. The way it was explained, threatening and bothered me a lot. At times I felt that the life had come to an end. It was my mother who helped me in overcoming the fear of this word. Embracing the fear of the word, had changed my life, attitude, my perspective to a great extent.

It is Failure. Handling failure is the most important thing required to be successful. According to dictionary, Failure is an event that does not accomplish its intended purpose. So from the definition, failure is an event and it is not life, all together. As it is an event, we do not have any control over it. But we have the choice, to get trapped and fall prey to it or to embrace it and rise again. Iron rod is made to the required shape when it is hot. Likewise, we can shape ourselves to be successful when we have failed. The choice is ours, and it is we who decide which way to take. The altitude, to which the success people reach, is based on the attitude with which they embrace the failures in their lifetime.

We can define failure as success and success as failure, it is all the perception with which we take it. Law of Thermodynamics would help us to understand it better. The law says "Energy can neither be created nor destroyed but can be transformed from one form to another". We would put in the maximum of our energy for any given task, since we would not know the outcome of the task and also because we want every task to succeed. According to Newton's law the energy we had spent has been transformed from one form to another. There is nothing we have lost. This is parallel to the teachings from Bhagawat Gita. Even if the failure does not lead directly to a success, it can be seen as a step along the way. Some people consider a failure as a lesson; some consider it to be a setback. So the key is to identify the form to which our energy has transformed and move on.

Here are what great personalities to say about Failure:

"Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, so go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that’s where you will find success."
– Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM

"Many people dream of success. Success can only be achieved through repeated failure and introspection. Success represents the 1% of your work that results from the 99% that is called failure"
– Soichiro Honda, the founder of Honda


From the above quotes it is obvious that only failure is the major component of all Success. So failure is required to be successful. If you meet with failure then you are sure to succeed. If you still do not believe, read on the following passage about a great personality:

At the age of seven, a young boy and his family were forced out of their home, and the boy was forced to go to work. When the boy was nine, his mother passed away. He had a job as a store clerk, but lost it when he was twenty. The young man wanted to go to law school, but had no education. He went into debt when he was twenty-three, to become a partner in a small store. It was only three years later that his business partner died, and left him with a debt that took years for him to repay. He dated a girl for four years and, at the age of twenty-eight, decided to ask her to marry him. She turned him down. Thirty-seven years into his life, he was elected to Congress... on his THIRD try. He then failed to be re-elected. This man's son died when he was only four years old. At age forty-five, he ran for the Senate...and failed to be elected. He persisted at politics and ran for the vice-presidency at age forty-seven, and again lost. Finally, at the age of fifty-one, this man was elected President of the United States. His name was Abraham Lincoln

From the above it is evident that it is the determination, which takes us to our goal. No matter what comes in between, we can for sure reach our goal. Successful people sit on a throne, which is rock solid, placed the strong foundation, which is formed with their failure. In fact may great successes started out as a failure. 3M is a good example to explain it. When it invented glue it was a failure because it did not stick. It then used the glue as the basis for the Post-it-note, which turned out to be a huge success.


The most interesting statistics is that more than 95% of people give up when they are 5% short of their Success. Edison's attitude of 'failure' is motivating. When asked why so many of his experiments failed he explained that they were not failures. Each time he had discovered a method that did not work. What an attitude? That's why he is Edison. So failures are stepping stones for success. In Penn State University, there is a course for engineering students called Failure 101. The students are motivated to take bigger risks and experiment. The quicker they get more number of failures, the sooner they get their A grade. Failures means better grades.

Quite interesting isn't it? Do you want to embrace more failures? Then try out more and more options...

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