LEARNING FROM FAILURE

One common instance of the dichotomy in people’s thinking is their placing of success and failure at opposite poles. Generally speaking, people think that they have either won or they have lost out in life. They do not consider any other alternative.

But if life’s eventualities were looked at through the eyes of wisdom, wewould find that the dichotomy of success versus failure is not realistic. The more realistic and wiser categorization of meaningful events in human life is mentioned in the title of this article, that is, ‘success versus experience’. From the viewpoint of the common man, success means achieving his target, while failure means, having lacked the ability or the drive to do so. But this is not the whole story. What should happen—and very often does happen—is when a man fails to achieve his target, his failure should trigger a very powerful thinking process which examines the whole situation afresh and then his own nature should thrust him into making every effort to turn his failure into success. Once this train of thought has been set in motion, consciously or unconsciously, he should accept the possibility of having a second chance. Once he begins to see the matter in a new light, he will come to the conclusion that if he has failed to capitalize on the first chance, it just doesn’t matter, a second chance still awaits him. He will realize that, by careful re-planning, he can avail of that second chance. One notable example of this is the course adopted by the sixteenth US president, Abraham Lincoln. When he entered politics, he took part in the presidential elections. Then, for a variety of reasons, he lost in the different elections no less than eight times. Yet he didn’t lose hope and finally won the elections at the ninth attempt, becoming America’s sixteenth president.The fact is that you should not take defeat as something final.

You should take defeat as experience. By doing so, you will be stimulated to reappraise the situation and come up with fresh solutions. In the lightof past experiences, you will be able to do better planning and will seekopportunities to avail of a second chance. Finally, by better planning, you will be able to convert your defeat into success.

Never take defeat as an ultimate disaster. Take defeat as experienceand then you will never become the victim of frustration