Try. Fail. Learn.

Life is bittersweet. While we all have (and deserve) our share of successes and accomplishments, we also cannot avoid failures.

We are all conditioned to highlight all the good things that have happened in our lives. We lose no single opportunity to speak about what we have achieved and all the great experiences that we had. But what about our failures and low times?

No one wants to tell the world that they failed at some aspect of their lives. That’s the reality. We have all slipped and fallen hard at one point in time or another.

How often do you listen to people say “yes, I failed”? Hardly.

There was a time when I could not bear the thought of failures. No matter what I did, even the trivial stuff, I made sure I would not fail to deliver. Be it the simplest assignments in my school and college life, to even drafting a blog post, I wanted it to be the best of the best.

For how long though? I answered my CA entrance exams for the first time ever around 5 years ago. I answered the papers with little to no preparation, expecting that as usual, I will score well. Hard luck! I did not clear the exam by a HUGE margin. I was devastated. Shattered. It took me a long time to acknowledge the fact that I failed an exam for the first time in my life.

After picking up myself slowly, I studied hard this time and wrote the exams again, with a lot of hope. Guess what? I failed again by a very small margin. Despite working very hard, it happened. I began questioning myself. Where did I go wrong?

Yet again, I stood up determined and answered the next exam and managed to clear it. Not great scores, but I passed.

The journey after clearing that exam and moving ahead has been full of potholes. There have been multiple times where I fell down. But I stood up every single time, nursed my wounds and got back on track.

Failure is not to be viewed only from the point of view of examinations. We fail in so many other dimensions of life. We fail in friendships, we fail in our career, we fail ourselves too.

As cliché as this may sound, but life is a race. We just have to keep moving forward despite falling down and hurting ourselves. The only difference here is that we compete with ourselves.

Today, I am a changed person. I see failure in a new light now. Every time I fail in some way, I take it as a lesson learnt, emerge stronger and wiser and continue in my journey.

This quote always used to be repeated in school, but we seldom understood the meaning behind it.
“Failure is the stepping stone to success.”

It truly is! And even if success does not come sooner than expected, the least we can do is to keep going ahead.

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