Dare to Fail
The toughest thing to do in life is accepting a monumental failure in life and have no qualms about it. No complaints, no cribbing. Just accepting and moving on is tremendously tough. You may have put a lot of effort to ace an exam or any other endeavors. But fate had other plans. You failed. The human capital invested in the efforts is so huge that it is virtually impossible for you to simply forget the failure and move on. A failure drains our physical as well as mental energy. You may slide into depression. Our natural tendency is to find a scapegoat and shift the blame. This article examines certain pragmatic means to recover from the dark spectre of failure, from an Indian perspective.
The first and foremost thing to do is to start exercising. You may have dedicated your whole energy targeting the goal you had, so that exercise was overlooked. Start with pushups, weighted squats, and deadlifting. Start slowly but be consistent in your daily workout. Besides, start walking every day. A casual stroll outside with open ears will fire your otherwise cluttered brain and the familiar but long-forgotten sounds of nature along with the bustling streets will allow you to view your failure through new perspectives. It may be the case that your failure may not be as consequential as you initially thought, or there are other ways around. Sticking to a strict outdoor exercise regimen will open your mind with a handful of future possibilities.
The second thing to remember in a failure is to develop a thick skin. In India, where children are taught never to fail under any circumstances, a failure means the end of the world. The constant criticism loathing failure is the source of a substantial portion of our problem in hand. A way to face this is to develop a stoic indifference to your “supposedly” well wisher’s opinions. All that matters is what you think of yourself. You cannot attend every barking dog. You need to develop the intuition of filtering through the criticisms, sympathy notes, etc, to figure out the genuine ones. In fact, you don’t even need genuine opinions. Make your ears deaf and carry on.
Thirdly, get yourself engaged in something to take your brains off from the daunting flashbacks of the failure. Start new habits to keep yourself busy. The hobbies could be in the lines of reading, blogging, traveling, riding, swimming, etc. This will reinject you now lost confidence which is vital for you to plan your next endeavor. Make sure to divide the chosen activity into bite-sized pieces, so small accomplishments could be mentally rewarded. Never take up anything insurmountable in the lines of mountain climbing, etc, which adds to your woes.
Simultaneously develop an ideological defense system that encompasses the thoughts about failure. Most importantly, identify the directives, goals, assertions which will make you mentally resilient. Understand that failure is part of the journey. Without grand failures, there is no success. And you must have learned one or two things about what went wrong. The enrichment of life primarily comes from the failure datapoints. Success data points are mostly redundant. It is the failure that teaches you who you are, what your fundamental beliefs and convictions are. A failure stretches your mind way more than a success. In western countries, failure is regarded as a feature. They are not afraid to fail. In India slowly a mindset is emerging recently that it is okay to fail. And always remember that the agony you felt in your failure is the biggest motivation for your next success. A failure will knock you out of your comfort zone. The comfort zone is the biggest impediment to success. Would you rather be Donald Trump who inherited big and made it to the biggest or an adopted Steve Jobs who started from the ground up and revolutionized the technology as we see now? It is always the pain that acts as the catalyst for a rational human to act. Actions arising out of sheer agony brings more fruit.
The ideological defense system could be made stronger by pondering over some simple yet deep quotes. One of the simplest quotes “No pain, no gain” punches way above its weight. If you want to learn swimming, you need to get into the water. But getting to the water doesn’t guarantee you swimming. In a way, you didn’t have any chance to win, if you decide not to participate. And you choose to participate but failed. You have gone through the process, but somehow you couldn’t make it to the end. You had the dared to start and that is a positive thing.
Another helpful quote is “What does not kill you makes you stronger”. It is always better to compare your intellectual/physical/personal status before the failure and after the failure. You may have failed the big game, but you have improved on something. Ever wondered why investment banking recruits theoretical physicists? They have nothing in common academically. But a theoretical physicist would have gone through the process of observing, analyzing, making a hypothesis, designing scientific experiments, and deriving conclusions in physics. It is this scientific framework that the physicist learns, which is equally applicable to financial engineering. Learning to use a certain set of tools, thus comprehending the generic idea of tools, so that for a new area, new tools could be learned easily, is the key here. You have emerged stronger than you went in after the failure because you learned the generic code of trying for a goal, which comes handy while gunning for another goal.
A quote by Theodore Roosevelt is very striking. “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” If you gave your best shot and failed, you are as good as succeeding. The intensity with which you gave your shot is what makes the difference.
Finally once a point of contemplation of what went wrong has reached, go for the next goal. Write your goal and read it every day to mentally structure and prioritize the steps required to reach it. Work with every resource you have and give the best shot. Treat the bygone failure as a stepping stone to success.
