When I am at home my elder daughter Alyssa always asks me to go for swimming. At the pool, she always pushes me to jump into water, every single time. The only reason my daughter wants me to go swimming is to make me comfortable in water, especially in deep water. I tried swimming couple of times, but I failed miserably. I was sinking all the time, not floating on the water. And, at the same time, my daughter was going like fish in water. I failed completely in my practice, many times, but I became better and better gradually. I felt it, I was improving little bit at a time.
In the beginning, I didn’t realize how big psychological impact that my daughter has put in my mind because I was struggling to breathe while swimming.
Now, I go swimming multiple times in a week. Not only that I am good at it, but I never realized that I could swim this well in sixteen feet deep swimming pool. After evaluating my success in swimming, I asked myself, is it essential to fail before to succeed in anything? Winston Churchill, former Prime Minister of United Kingdom and Nobel laureate, said: “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm”.
“Once we start our early adult life; we postpone our dreams for someday, and that someday never appears in our life.”
Jack ma, a Chinese businessman and philanthropist, had thirty different job rejections including KFC where twenty-three were accepted except him.
I’ve read the story of Milton Hershey who failed in three candy companies before he got a Hershey company.
Another person that comes in my mind is the most renowned and respected television personality Oprah Winfrey. She was fired from broadcast journalist saying that she is not appropriate for the television industry.
Stephen King, the author of ‘The Shining‘ failed multiple times before he became renowned author on the planet.
Walt Disney failed to secure the funding multiple times before he pioneered Disney World. Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton both had signs of Asperger’s as a young child, a disorder on the autism, but nothing stopped them from becoming the most brilliant scientists in history.
From these stories, the learning lesson we can gather is how to change, adapt and grow to defeat failures. If we want to overcome our failure and learn from it, we have to leverage the strength of the person next to us when we go up and down in our lives. The prime factor is family and people we associate as my daughter Alyssa showed me the ray of courage that I could be a good swimmer. Robert Greene, the author of ‘The Art of Seduction‘ highlights that success often follows struggles, emphasizing persistence through difficult phases but family member or mentor provides the consistent courage despite failures.
When I was a kid, I failed multiple times in different sectors, and it didn’t affect me deeply to follow my dreams. But when I started my early adult life; my rent, mortgage and responsibilities suppressed me, and I postponed my dreams for someday. In reality, that someday never came. After certain years, my inner desire and enthusiasm about my dreams became so thinner and thinner until it completely disappeared. Exactly the same thing happened in my singing dream, even though I invested significant time and money on it. I used to sing songs in my high school and as an undergrad but the dream of becoming an aspiring singer vanished very quickly.
If I would have to start my dream again, I wouldn’t regret it now, the worst-case scenario I would get failure from the dream project. But I would continuously accept it and move with adjustments and refinements. John C. Maxwell, the author of ‘The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership‘ encourages to “Fail early, fail often, but always fail forward”.
“Wealth is the freedom to do things that we want to do with the people we want to associate with.”
The truth is, regret is permanent, but failure is temporary. We just don’t spend our time searching successes all the time, we have to spend time looking at ways to keep studying the failures which we already have.
Success and failure both are measurable in life, if we are very serious about them.
There are generally three components to measure success: health, wealth and prosperity. The significance of these things we realize only in later stages of life, once we pass the actual time and reflect. The consequence, we start living the life of regret. If we are feeling healthy in each passing day with a new vigor, then it is a first sign of success. If we are feeling wealthy in each passing day with financial independence, then it is a second sign of success. Remember, wealth is different than rich. Rich is accumulation of money, but wealth is accumulation of positive mindset to create quality life for ourself as well as for the society. Wealth is the freedom to do things that we want to do with the people we want to associate with. The third sign of success is to grow and progress on each passing day by learning something new.
“Randy Komisar: The risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later is very dangerous.”
If we don’t fail, we don’t invest on us, as said by Warren Buffett, the greatest investor and philanthropist of all time. Therefore, failure is inevitable because it teaches us to invest on us whatever the field and profession that we adopt. Warren Buffett started investing when he was eleven years old and he is doing the same as of today, he is 94 years old now. Personally, I invested one hour each day for ninety days in my swimming to become ordinary swimmer.
Investment on us is far more powerful than investment on product or service or any other things in life.
Majority of failed people are unable to differentiate between a job and a career. They do the same job throughout their life, but they hate it every single day.
They don’t do anything about it, they come home, complain about it, watch TV and sleep, and repeat the same cycle tomorrow and don’t notice how fast 20, 30 and 40 years slipped away. The success mantra is, if we really hate the job, then we should escape it as soon as possible. Randy Komisar, the author of ‘The Monk and the Riddle‘ said, “The risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later is very dangerous.”
Conclusion
A job for many of us is a simple way to pay our bills and obligations, but a career is a deeper symbolic dignity to move into quality life by creating value.
Failure forces us to seek competency and mutual relationship among the coworkers in the work field and friends and family in the society. Rare and valuable skills are result of deep focus, deliberate study and rigorous practice. These are tools for building any skills that we want in life by ruthlessly devoting ourself beyond our comfort zone.
The more we try to comprehend failure, the more we learn how to succeed. The only requirement is patience. Bill Gates says it beautifully, “patience is fundamental, helping people persist when things get tough, leading to eventual results.”
By origin, human needs each other’s back to succeed, mostly not to repeat the same failure over and over again.
Alyssa, my daughter, needs me in her science experiment, and I need her for my swimming tips.
Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.
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Good Yam. Keep it up.
Thank you Rajesh.