Most of us are afraid to fail.

However, when we are unsuccessful at a certain endeavour, is this really failure or simply a lesson? Should every unsuccessful attempt by us to do something be considered a failure at all? Personally, I feel that the word “failure” should not even be in our vocabulary. The term “failure” should have been supplanted by the term “lesson” a long time ago. Instead of telling ourselves that “I have failed”, we should tell ourselves that “I have learnt a valuable lesson.” It was through sheer perseverance and determination that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. His famous statement that “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration” should always be remembered.

Most of us either cease to look deeper into any unsuccessful endeavour that we pursue or we couldn’t identify the lessons behind some of our experiences. One way we can learn lessons from setbacks will be penning personal journals. When we write down specific incidents in our life, we have a stronger tendency to take a long, deep look at issues.  From there, it’s easier for us to identify lessons that we should learnt.

Life sometimes works in mysterious ways that we often do not understand. However, if we are observant, we can see a pattern. If we do something and it is unsuccessful, our bad experiences will keep coming back as long as we are doing the same things the same way over and over again. It’s only when we change our way of thinking and/or way of doing things can we succeed in this endeavour.  This probably explains why someone will say that they have always ended up in bad relationships. If we are to look deeper into their relationship problems, we will realise that the cause for the bad relationships is – more often than not – the same reason. Similarly, a worker who does not communicate well with his or her colleagues due to a personality problem will always encounter the same problem wherever he or she goes.

It can be observed then that to be successful, we need to explore, examine and analyse the ways that we go about doing things. It’s often that we need to change ourselves to adapt to life, and not the other way round.  And it’s only when we examine our thoughts and behaviours,  analyse the differences and choose the optimal way of doing things can we be successful.