To many people, the above title question seems rather odd. The next logical reaction from such people would be “how on earth could I ask how one perceives failure when right from our earliest school days, we were taught to abhor failure? We heard it from teachers, parents, friends, friends’ parents, and so on and so forth.
Some of such statements were probably as follows:
(1)“you cannot afford to fail.”
(2)“ If you fail in school, you cannot get a good job!”
(3)“anyone who fails cannot amount to anything good in life”
(4) “you must get good grades in school so that you can get a good job!”
As we passed from grade school to high school to college, we kept hearing the same talk about failure over and over again that we made conscious efforts to pass our exams in flying colors.
Failure was never an option. Any of our colleagues who was unfortunate to fail was labeled a no good and was taunted in front of the class and told that he or she would never amount to anything in life.
Unfortunately, the emotional and psychological effect of such statements made some of those people taunted and intimidated accept what was told them as the truth and they just wandered through life without any achievement.
However, very few others, who never accepted such statements, tried everything possible to prove their worth. They won. They achieved. Now do you doubt what I’ve just described above?
Okay then, go study the live stories of people like Thomas Edison who contributed immensely to humanity through several inventions; Robert Kiyosaki, real estate multi-millionaire and author of several best-selling books like Rich Dad, Poor Dad; Cash Flow Quadrant; Retire Young, Retire Rich; Henry Ford who made immense wealth through the assembly and mass production of cars in Ford Motors, a company that still exists to date.
Thomas Edison had only 3 (three) months’ of formal schooling and was sent home because he could not pass in school. His mother never lost faith in him. The rest is history.
Some of Robert Kiyosaki’s teachers taunted and labeled him a no good because he could not get good grades like the top students of his class. Read his books and you would see the story of a man of achievement.
Let me make one thing very clear to you my dear friend and reader: whoever abhors failure does not really understand what it means. As master salesman and motivational speaker Zig Ziglar says, “failure is not a person but an event!” Leadership expert and author John Maxwell says, “failure is not an event but a process!”
Both statements are correct if you understand the fact that as Zig Ziglar tried to explain, it is the activity that failed and not the person, and as John Maxwell explains, failure is a part of the learning process that leads to success. Maxwell also emphasized that success is also a process because one may think he has succeeded and then relax.
Successful business people and organizations recognize the importance of viewing success as a continuous process to enable them come up with innovative ideas of growing their business. From their experience, a competitor is always thinking of ways of improving and would soon overtake them if they relax.
It is a lack of understanding of failure that makes many people wander through life in poverty and want. Because of the wrong programming we had from formal school, we see failure as something that should never be a part of us. We only want to be seen as people of achievement.
As a result, whenever failure comes, we wrongly see it as the end of the world. A true story is told of a man who was laid off along with others from his job, and guess what? He committed suicide. To the man unfortunately, the world had come to an end and he took his life as a result.
Thomas Edison said “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up.” Edison’s absolute belief in this comment was responsible for his having tried 1,000 times (yes, one thousand times) before achieving his invention of the incandescent bulb.
Edison believed as author Napoleon Hill said, “there are no limitations to the human mind, only those we acknowledge.” This simply means you are the only one who can label yourself or what you do or did as a failure. Nobody can tell you that you are a failure unless you choose to accept the statement as the truth.
……………………….To be continued next week.
(c) copyright Gabriel Ama
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