Success through failure
In 1962, four nervous young musicians played their first record audition for the executives of the Decca Recording company. The executives were not impressed. While turning down this group of musicians, one executive said, “We don’t like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out.” The group then went on to be a phenomenal success in the music industry : they were none other than The Beatles.
Ironic isn’t it, how failure leads to success. The founder of IBM, when asked how to be successful, said “Just Double your failure rate.” Unfortunately, failure is the label we stick on unsuccessful ventures. It has literally become a synonym for incompetence. And that is exactly where we go wrong. Our failures by themselves aren’t so terrible, for the most part it’s how we think about them that gives them the power to pull us down. The truth is the more we fail, the closer we get to success. Only through the most brutal of failures does one see the light of success. When we diagnose our failures and figure out where we went wrong, we’re literally teaching ourselves by trial and error.
When Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, he tried over 2000 experiments before he got it to work. A young reporter asked him how it felt to fail so many times. He said, “I never failed once. It just happened to be a 2000-step process.” This is the kind of attitude we all need to imbibe. When we failed as toddlers while learning to walk, we had a good cry but then we stood up, dusted ourselves, and kept on going. We didn’t say even after 20 stumbles, I guess this “walking thing” isn’t for me. We kept on trying, even if it took us twice as long as someone else. But we did it!
I believe the path to success is paved with bricks of failure and mortar of rejection. We can’t succeed if we can’t grow. We can’t grow if we can’t learn. And mind you, we just can’t learn if we can’t fail. Thus, to say, I don’t want to fail, is to say, I don’t want to succeed. Indeed!
SANYUKTA NADKARNI
MBA-ITBM
BATCH : 2013-2015
