How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?
Failure teaches us a lot of things. It makes us better at what we do, providing an endless scope to improve upon ourselves.
More importantly, failures tell us the things we are awful at and must try to avoid if we are attempting to make or keep an impression. For example, I have failed to learn how to dance in life and it is not due to lack of trying, so at events where there is a possibility of being called out to dance, I would rather be unwell than a fool making some non-human like movements and becoming a joke for as long as every witness there remembers it.
Now, failures are of several kind, a personal failure like failing to be consistent with that morning walk one decides to do, then there is professional failure which can happen in one’s profession and career due to many reasons even if it is not their fault, there is also a financial failure where one falls short of adequately managing the finances. There are a few others as well and I was told this by an old acquaintance whom I met at a bus-stop one day.
“You have given a lot of time learning and thinking about them,” I said to him and then I asked out of curiosity, “did you have to deal with some kind of failure yourself?”
“I am dealing with one now,” he said, “After retirement I have failed to find why I am in this world now. People call it an existential crisis; I call it existential failure.”
‘I call it?’ I thought about those words as I began to wonder if he made up all those kinds of failures himself.
Basically, at one or the other point of life or maybe a lot more than a few points, in fact almost every day, you will be unable to achieve a desired outcome and that is what is considered a failure. Some failures happen instantly, while some happen over the time and then you realise one day ‘Oh sh**’, yes like that, like when I was in school I disliked reading and writing and now I am doing it every day and I wonder ‘only if I had realised it back then that I could do it, then I would have scored a lot better and then later my school teachers wouldn’t make an example of me and say “Look even he made something of his life”’
In a way the failure to academically do something good in school despite the potential, might have driven me to do something that would change my past image that people would remember no matter what, as is human nature, but they would remember me for something better as well, for my work and it won’t be a lie to say, some of them are beginning to notice.
However, I do consider myself to be the hopeful one, even when facing imminent failure.
Written by Anuran Chatterji
Early Morning Memories 