A true step towards learning!

From a young age we are always tuned by our parents, friends, peers and society at large that it is all about winning. It is not good enough if you have not won and secured first place in every competition, every class and every situation in life. Does this sound all too familiar? Well guess what? I believe it is all right to fail once in a while and we can never truly be successful if we have never failed in our lives. You must have read about great stories of King Bruce and the Spider, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Alva Edison as to how many times they had failed in many endeavours in their lives before they became great and successful people. Their story teaches about perseverance amidst failure which we all know about and perseverance is not the subject here. It is failure as a step to learning and success! I remember the first time I faced my greatest failure. I had passed all the classes in school with good grades and even in college I managed to secure the sixth rank in the University, in spite of studying extremely hard for these exams. The first major failure took place when I was studying for my Chartered Accountancy (CA) exams. This is supposed to be one of the toughest exams in India and the remarkable thing about the course is that "it is extremely easy and cheap to enrol but extremely difficult to graduate from" unlike other courses like MBA. I passed my CA Intermediate exam in the first attempt and was very proud of myself. There were accolades all around from people since it was not very common for guys to pass when studying this course in Kerala. Most people move to one of the metro cities in India to appear for this course. For the final exam, there were two parts and I earnestly studied for the exams. It also helped that I had gone to Chennai for a few months for tuitions for some of the tougher subjects and was confident of passing the exam. After three months of intensive studies, I wrote the exams and was confident of passing. When the results came, I was devastated. I has passed in the group which I did not take tuitions but had failed in the group in which I was very well prepared, by 3 marks. This was really hard hitting and a turning point in my life. Suddenly, I was facing the first real failure in my life. Suddenly, all the accolades turned to jeers from the society, peers and every other smart alec who knew me. I could not understand why in spite of all my efforts, I had failed. I requested a recount of my answer sheet also but with no luck. It took me a while to get over this and I wrote again the next time and passed the CA Course. The learnings from this major failure which I would like to share with you all are: 1. Be Humble at all times: Success in life is a grace of God. You may have been blessed with a lot of abilities and this may give rise to a feeling that we are invincible and will succeed in every thing that we do. This is not true. At the end, we need to remember that we are all human and we do fail at times. This means also that we need to be tolerant to our fellow human being's failures. As Psalms 118: 8 says "It is better to trust in the Lord than put confidence in man". Prepare well and work really hard to overcome the task on hand but put your faith in God to see you through. I remember going for my driving test in Oman. After 10 years of driving in India, I thought the test would be a cake walk and told everyone so. I got my license in the third attempt after failing twice and I was humbled. It was the roundabouts and right side driving in Oman which needed getting used to. In Mumbai, we do not have roundabouts. If there was space for a roundabout, there would have been a building erected there by now. I had a whole new attitude towards the driving test in Abu Dhabi, where I live now and by the grace of God, I passed in the first attempt. 2. We cannot please everyone at all times: People will say good things about you when you succeed and the same people will say bad things and abandon you when you fail. We cannot live our lives to please everyone. I keep asking myself sometimes, all the people who give me sage advice when I succeed, how many of them would be there to give me a hundred rupees, if I had become poor and asked them for it. Suddenly, the advice would vanish and so would they. Learn to live our life to be honest to ourselves and to God. Those who stand by you in times of trouble are your true friends. Failure is the sieve of friendship. You will know who your true friends are when you fail. 3. There is always light at the end of the tunnel: This is perhaps cliché but true. Ever heard of these sayings: "After every dusk, there is a dawn". "It is darkest before dawn" This is one of the greatest learnings from failure. Try, Try till you succeed. If once you fail, we should keep trying provided the task is something which is achievable. It is interesting to see a child learning to ride a bicycle. He may fall down 10 times but he always gets up and picks up the bicycle again and in the end he is riding it so well. This is the innocent faith of a child who does not accept failure. I like this cartoon, which shows that many times we work so hard and fail and give up at the time, when if we had toiled a little longer, we would have seen great success! To sum up, there is no true learning without failure and we cannot truly enjoy our success if we have not failed! Cheers!