Celebrating failure 

“Failure is simply a cost you have to pay on the way to being right”- Seth Godin

Failure is the most dreaded word in the society we live in. Failures are often criticized and ridiculed. The golden rule works here if you don’t get good grades, you won’t get a decent job & you won’t go anywhere in your life. To put it simpler -failures are not smart and are often undesirable (borrowed from somewhere).

The process of criticizing failures starts very early in our lives. Parents are often found chiding the child for failure in the exam. It seems failure has got a whole new meaning these days, you have got 80% but if your friend has secured 90%, you are treated no better than a failure. Height of insanity!!!

I haven’t compiled this piece to be a critic nor treat me as a cynical person but I am against the very discrimination that ‘we’ failures endure in the current context.

In my quest, I shall desire the liberty to compare our ethos with that of the west. In the western world, failure is considered to be the stepping stone of success. In fact people are encouraged to do things out of ordinary and you are more than welcomed if you fail in the process.

Probably this culture of embracing failure nurtures the culture of winners in the society. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Whatsapp are all examples before the world that shows if you are prepared to fail, you are actually preparing to win coz you are just finding a way how not to do a thing.

In our case we are so hardwired to think in the non failure mode that we can’t take failure for an answer or you run the risk of loosing your prestige & respect among your colleagues, family & friends. You have to win at any cost; so far this idea has backfired miserably. We are nowhere on the map of producing a single company that can lay the claim of being the next big thing.

As Seth Godin will put it- failure is simply the cost you have to pay on the way of being the right. How true!!

James Clear in one of his blog post says you need to treat failure as a scientist would. Scientists whenever they get negative result treat their failure as a data point and go on to another to prove or negate a hypothesis. They are doing it in the hope that one day they will prove or negate a hypothesis.

If we want our coming generations to produce the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, we need to weed out the fear of failing. In fact it is the most obvious & important cornerstone in one’s life.

Success hardly teaches you a lesson but your failures do.