“Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement.
One fails forward toward success.” – C. S. Lewis
***
A lot of people never reach the pinnacle of success because they are afraid to take the necessary step – that of facing failure. They are contented to stay in their comfort zones knowing that if they stay there nothing will happen to them. True enough, they won’t go far.
How will a person know what lies ahead of him if he doesn’t pursue whatever he desires in his life? “Take a chance!” urges inspirational speaker Dale Carnegie. “All life is a chance. The man who goes furthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare.”
J. K. Rowling, the famous British author of the Harry Potter series, is a case in point. In a commencement address delivered before the Harvard graduates some years back, she revealed that the biggest fear for her at that time “was not poverty, but failure.”
She revealed, “We all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So, I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.”
Rowling told the graduates: “You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”
Had it not been for her early failures in life, Rowling wouldn’t be as successful as she is now. Failure, she said, “meant a stripping away of the inessential.”
She explained, “I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”
If at times you feel that you have not had the same chance that others have, ask yourself what chance did some famous people have? Remember that “it is not so much the size of the dog in the fight that counts, but the size of the fight in the dog.”
“You cannot grow, in whatever dimensions, without taking risks, and if you have stopped growing you might as well be dead,” declared Eva Figes. “You cannot know people without loving them, which brings its attendant risks of loss and pain. You cannot climb Mount Everest without risking your neck, and nothing can be achieved without risking time, effort, and reputation.”
Perhaps this statement from Alexander Graham Bell is a good reminder: “When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”
One of the reasons why most people don’t try anything new is their fear of committing an error, a mistake, a blunder. In a commencement speech delivered during the graduation exercises of the nine colleges of the University of the Philippines some years back, Dr. Rafael R. Castillo offered this advice: “I assure you, it’s not the end of the world when you commit a mistake or several mistakes early on in your career.
“Give it your best shot always,” he told the audience attending the ceremony at the Plenary Hall of the Philippine International Convention Center, “but when – despite your best efforts – you slip and fall every now and then, rise up again and give it another shot. I believe that when we’re sincerely passionate in what we do, God always provides safety nets just in case we fall at times.”
People don’t want to commit errors. They always want to win. The word losing is not part of their vocabulary. Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all the time thing. You don’t win once in a while; you don’t do things right once in a while; you do them right all the time. Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.
What is the difference between a winner and a loser? Vince Lombardi shares this thought: “The winner is always part of the answer. The loser is always part of the problem. The winner always has a program. The loser always has an excuse. The winner says, ‘Let me do it for you.’
“The loser says, ‘That’s not my job.’ The winner sees an answer to every problem. The loser sees a problem for every answer. The winner sees a green near every sand trap. The loser sees two or three sand traps near every green. The winner says, ‘It may be difficult but it’s possible.’ The loser says, ‘It might be possible but it’s too difficult.’”
Which are you?
American humorist Mark Twain advised, “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So, throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.”
Boxing phenomenon Muhammad Ali has another idea: “Champions aren’t made in the gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside of them – a desire, a dream, a vision. They have last-minute stamina, they have to be a little faster, they have to have the skill, and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill.”
