Why it's OK to fail sometimes?

"Success is not final, Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts." - Winston Churchill

Life never represents a constant growth curve, sometimes it goes down as well. It is more represented by the Electrocardiogram (ECG) graph, moving up and down in cycles. It tells us both success and failures are a part of life. One is nothing without the other, both serve a purpose. Imagine having all the success and never any failure. Success without failure will never bring the same kind of joy and emotion. It would be a mundane and monotonous feeling. It is this failure that let us enjoy the success when we achieve it.

We must never take failure to heart and deal with it on practical level. We should learn from it and make necessary tweaks to improve from it, while not repeating it again. Humankind has achieved a lot since it evolved from apes, from inventing fire to a private company like SpaceX launching astronauts into space, it was never success at first instance , it has been a long journey of failures, tumbling and getting up countless times that have propelled us to be where we are this day. A toddler tries to walk but fails several times, but the consistency to keep trying and failing lets the toddler walk. Success is a destination to which there is only one path filled with failures. It is safe to say failures are the stepping stones of success and without failures it might not be possible to find success. 

Failure is a way to gain invaluable experience, in good companies the hiring process makes sure candidate's failures are scanned and a good mix of success and failure is what gets candidates through. If you are somebody who does not like to open about their failures and only project success, it might not be perceived in a good light at such places. We all must own up to our failures and wear it as a learning curve, more the failure richer the experience, we should just make sure never to repeat the same mistake again. This will not only make sure that the learning is faster but it is diverse as well.

Society and families start telling their kids from a very your age about the negative perception surrounding failure. This perverse attitude towards a very fundamental human experience is condemnable. This makes people, from a very young age non receptive to failure, leading to negativity and depression once they encounter it. Not only do they stop experimenting and trying new things but they also try to play safe, leading to procrastination, while never reaching their full potential. We start raising a generation that only acts according to this perceived expectation that failure is perverse and one must never fail to stay acceptable in society. 

Students start taking up subjects that their parents think would bring them glory or would lead them towards a successful money-making career, never thinking or asking themselves; what is it that they want to study? what is their interest? Never allowing them to make decisions without data. While this might end up helping them find a job but makes their life miserable. While they might be able to do their job but they won't ever excel in it, because they lost motivation to begin with. At the end of the day passion and pride matters more in a job than money. There won't be any passion or pride in something they detest. All this because the parents assumed their kid might fail to make it big monetarily, once out of school. On the contrary even if the kid fails to secure the high paying career, they would chase their passion and do something they love. When they pursue their passion, they will make a positive change to the society by creating great work.

When failure is accepted, people start taking risks and experiment, reaching full human potential. It gives them the resilience to accept failure several times and yet keep trying till they find success and once they do find success, everything becomes worth it. A reporter asked Thomas Elva Edison "How did you feel to fail 1000 times?" Edison replied, "I didn't fail 1000 times, the light bulb was an invention with 1000 steps." This simple change in attitude towards perceiving failure as a step towards success is what can set humanity free to achieve almost anything they aspire to.

Conclusion:

The taboo around failure and lack of success should be abolished if we want the society to grow out of this perceptive mirage acting as a mental blockade constraining humanity from achieving what is rightfully theirs. Failure is an essential part of human development; nobody finds success without grinding through failure and this is true irrespective of the amount of resources one has. Humankind can achieve unimaginable glory if only they can understand that it's OK to fail.