Hi everyone, welcome back! Hope you are enjoying summer wherever you live. Few weeks ago, I examined a belief which tells us that we should do whatever is necessary while we are still young so that we can live an amazing life sometime in the future. This week, I would like to examine failure and a very popular belief associated with failure which tries to act as a motivator but I believe ends up doing more harm than good to a person’s psyche and that belief is ‘try, try and try again until you succeed’!
Belief: Try, try and try again until you succeed!
Sometimes in life you may feel like nothing seems to be working the way you want it to work or when you want it to work. The goals you set for yourself may not seem achievable. You may feel like you don’t have control over pretty much anything in your life! It may feel like someone up there in the sky is not your friend and doesn’t love you and wants you to suffer. It may feel like no matter what you do, it’s never enough. You may notice all these other people around you living their amazing lives expect you! You may feel so frustrated, so hopeless, so unloved, so unworthy all at the same time! You may feel like a complete and total failure! The very raw experience of failing is what you may be experiencing…
‘Failure’ is something that every single one of us experiences in our lifetime. It doesn’t discriminate between rich or poor; white or black; intelligent or average; fancy title or not. It’s a basic truth of life and living and if you allow yourself to learn from it, it has the power to transform you! It can transform your beliefs, the way you think about life and living, the way you think about failure and success and thus it can change the way you go through the very raw experience of failing itself if you allow yourself to listen to the messages that are being sent your way! Amazingly, it also opens a well of opportunities that you were turning a blind eye towards until now! It allows you to move in the direction that is meant for you in this lifetime. However, most human beings don’t think about failures this way. Most of us are so afraid of failures and the experience of failing itself. And they are afraid because from the very beginning of their lives, the people around them tagged failure as something bad, something embarrassing, something that should not have happened but if it did happen, you are to bury it into a dark corner of your heart and with the help of positive thinking and your will power, you should just keep trying again and again and again….until you succeed! And when you finally succeed, that’s when you feel worthy as a human being, devoid of all embarrassments, able to talk about your success and just pretend that your failures never even happened! Failure is like this monster that exists in everyone’s thinking, but we are all too embarrassed to acknowledge that it not only exists but takes up quite a bit of room in our heads each time we try anything!
So, let me ask you this – what is the worst thing that happened to you when you failed? Did you feel awful? Did you feel like you have nothing to live for? Did you cry your eyes out? Did you feel like this is only happening to you in this whole wide world? Did you feel very alone and lonely? Folks, whatever it is that you may have felt or are still feeling because of whatever you have failed at and how many ever times you may have failed at that thing, failing is just as important as success. Failure is the Universe’s way of maneuvering you in the right direction especially when you are that person who has everything planned for yourself and your life, however, your plans don’t match the Universe’s plans! But because most of us have a negative perspective on failures; we tend to just stay in that frustrated mode and keep trying over and over again for that same thing without even realizing that there could be something else that we could be doing with our time and with our life.
A few years ago, I read somewhere that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. And to me, that is exactly what ‘try, try and try again, until you succeed’ means. By using this belief to try to achieve whatever it is that we want to achieve; what we ignorantly end up doing is denying all the other possibilities that are out there which are just waiting for our attention. And I don’t even need to give you examples this time because there are many that you can find from your own life about how you failed at something and then something even more amazing happened to you. Something that you didn’t even realize was possible. What I have been realizing over the years is that we have created a very narrow definition of success in our heads and all of us like sheep in a herd try to go about achieving success in very similar ways – getting a degree and working in a corporate job and making six figure salary etc. etc. But let me ask you this – how many of you actually love what you do in your jobs other than the paychecks that you get? If you don’t love what you do regardless of whether you are a rocket scientist or a janitor, then I think you still are a failure if you just have the guts to ask your own heart :-)..it will tell you the truth!!
Folks, I have had a very intimate relationship with failures, quite a bit of them actually! But failures is the very reason why I am able to express my heart out and type up these words which resonate with so many of you! I didn’t realize it back when I was in the middle of all my failures but the Universe was just trying to reveal all that I am capable of in this lifetime :-)…Do you know what you are truly capable of? Just ask your heart and do what it says even if you feel fear in every cell of your body! Just do it!!
And as always, feel free to leave a comment if you feel like leaving one. Until next time, listen to your failures and learn from them….
