Right from childhood, it is ingrained in our thoughts that failure is a terrible thing. Failing a year in school is thought as wasting a year of life. Students on the borderline of academic pass/fail line have to deal with the constant stress of staying on the right side of this line.
Most of them do! They come out of the system without facing failure. But the race isn't quite complete yet. It keeps getting tougher and tougher. There comes college, now the odds of survival are slightly tougher. The ones who passed out of school with flying colors are suddenly scrambling to pull things together to avoid another failure. Some of them succeed here too.
But then here's the problem for people who come through this system without failure. Life is much more than standardized tests where where you are judged on memory/knowledge/aptitude et al. It has much more to it! Guess what, having never faced failure before is going to make it ever more difficult to face it when the time comes.
It can come through variety of forms. Rejection from the girl you adored so much, failing the job interview of the company of your dreams, not getting the promotion you really worked hard for. As a child we learn to deal with so many things, anger, jealousy, frustration, peer pressure and many more. But we never had to deal with failure. This makes us react in mysterious ways.
We start looking for faults within ourselves, faults within the system, start looking at inspirational quotes, motivational you tube videos(bring on Rocky speech!) and so on. We start believing in luck(good/bad), in superstition, in other things that take our mind away from failure. Gulp down a drink or two.
But, we seldom think, is failure really that bad? It's just a phase! It happens to most of us. It gives us good advise for our future endeavors. It makes us aware of our capabilities. It gives us a chance to try again. It makes us humble.
Maybe it's not such a bad thing! Maybe somebody should have told me this earlier!
