What is the difference between a mistake and a failure? Well, mistake is what you do – the cause, and failure is the outcome of that mistake – the effect. But at the same time it is the failure which many a times, infact most of the times is the cause for another well sought after effect – success.
So what do you need to convert your failure into success. Simple. Learn from it. For there are no mistakes made in life, there are only lessons learnt, provided you dont repeat your mistakes. Atleast repeat it differently. Life does not give a second chance many a times.
Did any of your friends tell you that they haven’t done any mistake at all? Well, yes it is possible, provided they have never tried anything new. If you have done no mistakes in the past 2 years, then you have wasted two precious years of your life. Now be cautious, making a mistake is not the same as making a crime. Mistake is what you make without knowing that you are making a mistake. You are not aware of the outcome and are trying out an action whose outcome goes against your expectations, and then it becomes a mistake. Where as a crime is making a mistake, very well knowing about it.
Now there is so much to learn in this world that I will need a hundred lives to make all the mistakes on my own and learn from them! So please do learn from others mistakes also. The best place to learn this would be to read autobiographies of great, the not so great, of all kind of personalities. Because, each autobiography contains details of a life term of mistakes in it! Autobiographies of people like Adolf Hitler – Mein Kempf – contain mistakes that didnt work – a billion people suffered from that. Autobiographies of people like Mahatma Gandhi – My Experiments with Truth – contains mistakes that did work – that made a billion people follow commands of a single man – a man who was half naked and had nothing except for the stick in his hand.
Did somebody tell you that his views about the world have not changed in the past twenty years? Then, either he has experienced every damn thing in this world 20 years ago, or he has never learnt anything new in the past 20 years. The former is a rare case, and most possibly it is the latter. As we gain more experience in life, so do our views keep changing. In fact changing would be an inappropriate term for that. In reality our views would be upgrading or updating, for better or worse depending on our surroundings – friends and family – and the events that we encounter. A misguided youth might become a terrorist from an innocent teenager – or the same person might become a well known scientist – all depending on what happened to him and how he reacted to what happened to him.
So mistakes are like a feedback loop. They give feedback about our actions that are not worth being repeated. It is a process of learning – learning now not to walk by walking incorrectly, learning how not to ride by driving wrongly, learning how not to solve a calculus problem by using a wrong formulae, and in the process of making mistakes, understanding how things function. There are no experts on this planets who havent made mistakes. And the greatest experts on this planet are those who have made the largest number of mistakes, and hence have become experts by knowing all those ways which do not work, and hence which they will not try again.
When we are born our brain is an empty database. And it is the mistakes that we make that enable us to gather the information that we feed into our brain. Mistakes are not just limited to a single person. A family, a society, a country, all learn from their mistakes. The reason we brush in the morning, the reason we take bath, the reason we follow traffic rules, the reason our country has an army, the reason we use passwords, the reason we have a democratic system, the reason stock market goes down, the reason for a powercut, the reason UN came into existence, each of these have a history of past lessons which the generations, people, societies, nations have learnt from their past mistakes. History hence, should not be merely treated as just the past, but should be looked upon as lessons from the past. And it applies not just for human history, but for individual history as well.
While your success shows you your strength. Your failures reveal your weakness to you. And hence recognize your weakness from your failures. Its more important than knowing your strength.
It is not the number of failures that we should be worried about. It should be the quality of our attempts that we should be looking at irrespective of whether we fail or succeed. Look at a spider. No matter how many times we destroy its web, it doesnt get angry, it doesnt cry, it doesnt give up, it simply starts building a new web again from scratch. Now that has a great lesson in it. Never give up and always be prepared to start your life from scratch. Which is why Abraham Lincoln, the great American president succeeded in entering the white house, inspite of all his past failures.
Getting to the top is not difficult, what is really difficult is continuing to be at the top. And to be there you should be aware of your strengths and weaknesses equally, and should be willing to give up your false ego and take calculated risks.
All the mistakes are waiting to be made. Good Luck.
This Article written by Ramesh Kamath-Bangalore.
Author: Vicca Toria- UAE