Embracing Failure: A Guide to Self Learning #5

Failure is scary. It feels like a sandstorm that hits you out of nowhere and leaves you in shambles. Some see it coming, some don’t. Not just failing as a student, but as a professional, and more importantly as a person. 

No matter how big or small, it still has the ability to shut down all of our analytical abilities and hits us with constant emotions and suffering. It’s important that we realize that this isn’t the end of the world. After all, humans are lifelong learners, aren’t we? 

I personally think that failure has been stigmatized by society and the schooling system more than it should have been. Every step of the way there’s a high-stake exam that has the key to open hundreds of doors at once, or a key that doesn’t fit any locks at all.  

But, do we stay locked out of our house when we lose our keys? 

That’s exactly what failure is. It’s a locksmith. A locksmith that makes a new key and opens the door YOU want. It has the ability to make you a hundred times more productive, and it will do so if you just look at things from a different perspective.  

Our generation’s endless pursuit of being “perfect” has ruined our capacity of embracing failure. Our minds are so focused on being this imaginary self that we never see failure coming and when it does, it ruins us. To be completely honest, we should welcome failure. It’s got to be our best friend. It shouldn’t make us lose objectivity, rather it should make us a more objective person every time.  

I have an idea. We’re scared of the weight the word “fail” holds, right? What if we just get rid of it? Instead of calling it ‘fail’, we just start calling it the First Attempt in Learning. That’s way better, isn’t it? No one can expect you to get everything right on the first attempt. May it be an exam in school or a competitive exam like NEET or JEE.  

Learning isn’t about marks. We live in an eco-system that praises toppers and lets everyone else just brew in their own insecurities and leaves them to sink in quicksand. That’s how it is though, we could hope that our reality could be better but there’s no workaround in the world we live in.  

You have two options now. You can sulk about how the world is and the injustice that all of us face. Or you could be different. You could start embracing all your failures instead of being scared of them. You have to ask yourself if you want to go that extra mile if you want to be the person you say you want to be if you want to find the satisfaction you frantically look for everywhere you go. 

It’s not the end of the world, it’s an opportunity that a lot of people have missed out on. We as students have the privilege to rectify our mistakes. Let’s say you didn’t score as much as you expected in an exam. Instead of being devastated by it, bounce back immediately. Go through each and every mistake and analyze what went wrong and why it went wrong.  

What next? You work. Work so hard that you never make that mistake again.  

It might sound like outright mainstream motivation that you’ve been hearing for decades, but it’s the only way possible. It’s basic human nature. It’s how we evolve. You have to set deadlines, come up with a system, find a hundred different perspectives on the same mistake.  

It’s an endless loop that was designed to work in our favor. We work, we fail, we recover and we get better, and it’s our responsibility to adapt, improvise and excel in this loop.