Every person, no matter rich or poor, is very familiar with failure i.e. not getting what you expected in life. Often times people fail and everyone knows about it and sometimes they just fail in silence. Sometimes the scale is quite big and sometimes it is miniscule in comparison. But no matter what kind of failure you encounter in life, it never becomes an easy feeling to deal with and rightly so as well. Because, failure is not something that you are supposed to just walk off. It isn’t a feeling that you should try to distract yourself from either. In fact, one of the worst things you can do is to forget about your failure and continue on with your life as if nothing had happened. In my opinion, the only thing worse than that is letting your failure stop you from moving forward in life i.e. becoming pessimistic. The former is bad because it makes you prone to a similar kind of failure again in the future as you have not derived any lesson from it and simply decided to move on while the latter is bad because you have succumbed to the negativity. The most important thing to remember when you fail is that it is completely okay to fail and fail not only just once but multiple times as well. It doesn’t matter how small or big the scale of your failure is, it is okay so long as you get back up again and try not fail the same way again. The true power of failure is that it teaches you something that becomes engrained in your very own soul and stays with you forever whereas succeeding may only bring you what you want for a limited amount of time after which you might try to doubt your own abilities(imposter syndrome). The person who has failed multiple times to get where he is knows more about the journey than the one who got there on the first attempt. This is important because often times you will find yourself trying to navigate on a similar path once more. For example, job interviews are likely to be repeated many times over because it is very rare that a person will get his first job and stay there for the rest of his life. A couple of switches are needed before most people find their ideal job. Failing on job interviews is okay so long as you do not fail twice for the same reason.
Ideally, your goal should be to succeed but a realistic goal that you can think of is to not fail for a reason that you have already failed before. Consider this the range of your desired goal i.e. success is the maximum and not failing for a known reason is the minimum. As long as you stay inside this range, do not worry about failing and keep trying again. One thing people often fear is not the failure itself but the opinion of people that comes with that failure. They think that just because they failed, people will think badly about them or see them in a different light. If you even have a speck of such fear than let me be the first to tell you that no one really cares about your failures as much as you care about them. You can fail brilliantly and you will still only be a hot topic for another person for a very short time. No one is going to remember your failures as much as they will remember your success and the reason for that is because the latter is visible to everyone whether they like it or not. You can fail ten or maybe even twenty times and succeed only once afterwards – yet the thing that people will remember is just your success. Only concern yourself with achieving something that falls in the desired goal range from above and focus on the road ahead, not on the people standing on the side.
The last thing I want to mention is how you should think about failure in your life from now on. Since we already discussed that it is okay to fail and we should not be afraid of it before even trying to achieve success, what should you do if you do fail? Imagine yourself in such a situation where you have just failed to meet your expectations and you feel dejected. You feel ashamed to face everyone else but worst part is that you feel disappointed in yourself. No matter how magnificently you failed, people will forget about it with time and you will also get used to distracting yourself from this disappointment with time. You cannot change what other people remember after some time but you can certainly stop yourself from getting distracted away from this disappointment. Yes, you need to cherish this disappointment. It is more beneficial for you than any other motivation quote on the internet because they are just words written by someone else whereas this disappointment is the culmination of your own experience. No quote will ever give you any motivation whatsoever, it is only the personal experience that you can bind with those empty words to give it a meaning that is personally tailored to suit your needs. So, if you have a choice about remembering the experience itself or remembering it by binding it to something else, the former is definitely better. What you need to do is to accept feeling disappointed and conscience-stricken. You need to accept that you feel abashed in front of other people. You need to use these emotions as fuel and let them propel you to try again, but this time with vengeance. Simply trying again after a failing is commendable in itself, but if you truly use these emotions well, you will find yourself going at it with even more intensity than before. That is what I mean when I say that you have to come back with vengeance and try until you succeed. You should never try to convince anyone other than yourself that you will do something again with much more effort after experiencing your failure. That commitment is what you make to yourself and let that disappointment serve as its fuel to keep binding you to it. The moment you try to share that with someone else, your resolve will become weaker because your fuel will start to deplete more rapidly. No one else can make you work hard and try again but yourself. If you feel like you will be more likely to put in more effort if everyone around you expects you to then you are only deluding yourself. It will only add useless pressure on you. I say that it is useless because no matter how good of a performer you are under pressure, if that pressure is not put there by yourself but by someone else whose life is not directly affected by the outcome, then you will eventually realize that when things get tough and you will throw that pressure to the side along with everything else that motivated you to before it as well. Think of it as a general rule of thumb that you should never ever disclose your personal goals to other people as telling someone about them is equivalent to you breaking a piece from that goal and giving it away to someone else who may or may not even care about it. So, do not ever be afraid to fail but only try to never fail the same way twice. Each time you get back up after failing is a success in itself which most people around you will not be able to do. Keep going because you do not give up, I believe that whole-heartedly. Good luck!
