He who makes most mistakes, wins

He who makes most mistakes, wins

by Debi Prasad

                                              

Failure, to most people, is a scary word. We have been conditioned to avoid failure at a very young age. There always is a "right" and a "wrong" way of doing things, and the reward only goes to those who do the "right" things.  In school, we are taught that there is no excuse for failure and the consequences of failure would be disastrous for your life. So, even as kids, we develop an aversion to it. We perceive the "experience of failing" as a negative aspect in our life.

Two world-renowned psychologists, Daniel Kahneman, and Amos Tversky, who won the Nobel Prize for their work, found that the effect of loss is twice as great as the gain from a win. The negative impact of a loss is greater than the positive impact of a win. In this subtle way, the idea that failure is not good for us becomes embedded in our minds and we try to avoid it.

The bitter truth, however, is that failure is inevitable. There is no map to success which isn't marked by a string of failures.

Some of the biggest tech giants of our century have a very different perception of failure: they are tolerant of it and embrace it. Both Jack Ma and Jeff Bezos believe that failure is a part of the process. Ma recounting his failures in an interview in the World Economic Forum reminisced how he couldn't get a job in KFC or not getting accepted into Harvard after applying many times.

What this teaches us is that failure isn't the end of the road. In many ways, it's a beginning. It's like making all the wrong turns in life only to find the right one. So, if there's one thing I'd like to say to others, it's that failure isn't as catastrophic as people believe it to be, giving up is.

It is simply a process of trial and error. Just like our physical body which calibrates itself to do a specific task with a gradual increase in performance over time, our mind also uses this method leaving us with clues to success.

Thomas Edison once said: " Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure."

It may seem negative at first, the act of failing and as we have learned, humans have an acute aversion to failure. Yet, if you move past the fears, failure is the ultimate roadmap to success. There are some of us that are quick to recover from our failures while some of us are not so fortunate. However, one must always remember that it's not failure that hinders the path of success, giving up does.

If you resign yourself to your fate or shy away from your fears, you will always be the victim of your fear, like author Paul Coelho aptly said:

"There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure."

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