Fathoming Failures

If failures in life were to be the yardstick to assess our human worth, then there would be no human person left on earth; perhaps the animals and plants would be much better off in that case. We know that everyone encounters failures at some stage or other, and I would be bold enough to say that not a single human person is there, who has never encountered failures in life. We could say that failures are our second nature, and it is only because of our failures that we can bow down our heads before God, nature and circumstances and acknowledge our limitations. Every time I fail to accomplish something, I feel bad, and sometimes the failures put me off, and I regret for not doing my best for the work assigned, and when people cannot face failures, they go to the extent of ending their lives. Every time results in schools are announced, there would be at least a couple of cases of suicides of students.

When my friend told me that she had not got through one of the two examinations she had appeared for, I was not disturbed. From her voice I could make out that she was disturbed by the results, and she even said that it would take her a couple of days to get over the feeling. Serious people would often find it hard to accept failure, especially if they had given their best for a work and at the end to face failure is unthinkable. Such people think that failure indicates that all their labour has gone in vain, and it was a futile job that they had spent so much of their time and energy. But we do know that there are areas where success does not depend on our ability or intelligence alone; there are other factors which are responsible for getting through in life. Therefore we need to look at failures at the proper perspective.

How much of responsibility could we take up for the failures that we encounter in life? There is no magical formula with which we could measure the rate of our responsibility; it all depends on how much of the work depended ourselves per se. For instance, to get through the examination, mere intelligence is not enough; we would hope that one is able to write well in the examinations; feeling sick on the day of exam may be enough to produce bad results. Then we would hope that the answer script lands an examiner who is in his proper disposition to look at the paper objectively. If he or she had a fight at home in the morning, then the reaction of that anger might be reflected on the answer scripts. Then we would hope that the addition of the marks is done accurately and that there is no addition mistake, and lastly that the persons reproducing the marks on the final list do the good job and don’t change the figures. All these are responsible for our success.

Even if there had been a loophole in the entire process, then our success could be jeopardized. Therefore it is proper to take failures with a pinch of salt. There are external pressures which control our success; psycho-social and cultural context also contribute their own mite towards our success. My purpose is not so much to justify the failure that my friend had to face, but to look at success and failure with as much objectivity as possible. I had known that she was not in a proper frame of mind when she went to write the examination, and had even told me how she felt while writing the exam, and therefore I could not blame for failing in one exam. Blaming her for the failure could only cripple her self-confidence and usher in more failure.

How are we to look at failures in life? Failures in life cannot be taken as the failure of the person; we need to dissociate failures from the persons. Failures, we are told, are stepping stones to grow and forge ahead, and they could also become the proper motivation to excel and go beyond the expected standards. They could serve as the spark of flame which could explore the volcanoes of creativity and originality. If a school dropout could build an empire of software companies (I am referring to Bill Gates of Microsoft), and another school dropout who finished his schooling at the age of 13, could give the world the consciousness on the present moment (I am talking about Eckhart Tolle, who had revolutionized the world with his ‘The Power of Now’), we all of us can make something worthwhile out of our failures. The only precondition in the process is that we do not turn back, but fix our eyes on the goals set ahead and march forward.