FAILURE THE BACKDOOR TO SUCCESS

Almost every person who has ever achieved anything worthwhile with his or her life has not only experienced failure but experienced it many times. Obviously success isn't the absence of failure. It is having the determination to never quit. Dwelling on the positive side of "failure", we will not only overcome our disappointment but even surmount it and taste success. I thought of writing on this topic, because all of us in some point in our life have gone through failure, how did we cope with it. did we allow failure to take toll on our life and career?

While on this topic, let’s have a look at some of the great Leaders and Corporate personalities. Many of them may inspire you as they did to me, but then inspiration alone is not enough, it is perseverance and the will to succeed, that will see you through many a storm in your life. Did these people fail in their lives? Of course they did!!! Did they give up? See for yourself as you read and discover what happened to them.

It is well known that for 28 years Abraham Lincoln experienced one failure after another. In 1883 he has a nervous breakdown. When he ran for a speaker in 1838 he was defeated. In 1848 he lost re-nomination to Congress and was rejected for land officer in 1849. These failures didn’t stop him from battling on. In 1854 he was defeated for the Senate. Two years later he lost nomination for the vice president and was again defeated for the Senate in 1858. Yet despite it all, in 1860 he was elected president and went down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents.

Walt Disney was the same. He went broke several times and had a nervous breakdown before he became successful.

Albert Einstein and Werner Von Braun both failed courses in mathematics. Henry Ford was broke when he was 40. Thomas Edison’s school teacher called him a dunce, and later he failed over 6,000 times before he perfected the first electric light bulb. History is filled with similar stories.

Without a doubt we can see that in case of the above prominent personalities, it is failure that provided the motivation and the determination to persevere until they achieved their goal.

No matter how badly or how many times a person fails, he is never a failure provided he gets up just one more time he falls down. Further more like a high jumper one never discovers his full potential until he reaches a point of failure. As one person said, “Low aim, not failure is crime.” We must understand that “Failure is an event, not a person”. You can never call a person a failure; it is the event that has failed.

It is the failure itself that cripples people. “No matter how hard you work for success, if you thought is saturated with the fear of failure, it will kill your efforts, neutralize your endeavor, and make success possible.”

Lincoln, who hated slavery, overcame his many failures o eventually abolished slavery because he had determination, a noble cause to believe in and live for, and the courage to fight for that cause regardless of failures and setbacks.

Who better than Gandhi has tasted failure, it was his perseverance and the determination that gave us the freedom. A cause to live for doesn’t need to be as mighty as Gandhiji’s, but has to be meaningful. Everybody needs something bigger than himself to live for.

Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered with failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory not defeat.”

In conclusion, I would like to reiterate, the only real failure is not to get up one more time when we get knocked down. Through every failure there is always something valuable for us to learn. In fact failure is often our greatest teacher, a blessing in disguise. The key issue is to follow you Goal and remain focused.