…and what if I fail?
It was probably George Bernard Shaw who said: “My reputation grows with every failure”…
…quoting Samuel Smiles: “We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.”…
…and from Oscar Wilde: “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”…
‘Failure’ is a highly misunderstood (and misused) word — when something does not go ‘our way’, it automatically gets tagged as a ‘failure’ — no thought is given to the process and experience and learning that we go through before we arrive at the conclusion that this was simply not to be the way we perceived it to be (and we really don’t know that for sure either — often times it’s more of an assumption we make) — and we obviously do not reflect upon our ‘perception’ of things to try and understand if we may be looking at the whole thing from a disadvantaged angle…maybe if we shift focus a bit, and get out of the dark, damp box that we’ve put ourselves into; maybe then this is not a failure…
Rabindranath Tagore wisely articulated: “We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.”
…and my favorite Thomas Edison one-liner: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
I believe that there is no such thing as failure – reality is that within every perceived state of failure there is an experience, a discovery, a lesson – drawing from that, I have answered many more questions and solved many a mystery — in a way, I’m glad that I have ‘failed’ so many times — things are so much clearer now that I am aware of what not to do, where not to go, how not to behave, who not to trust…I sympathize with those who have not yet bothered trying simply out of the fear of failure…
One Response to “…and what if I fail?”
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Neuron on June 11th, 2009
“I believe that there is no such thing as failure…”
On the contrary, I believe that there is a such thing as failure – not achieving what you set out to achieve. Granted, failure has within its realms the “success” of learning what not to do, the fact of the matter is that failure of the task at hand is true. Those lessons learned from the result are simply that – lessons learned. They are in no way a ‘cover-up’ for the absence of success (or failure) at what was set out to do.