This is perhaps one of the most important blog posts I will ever write, and will hopefully become something I will look back at in future moments of doubt or frustration, or when I find myself in a seemingly endless rut of failure where all efforts seem futile.

What is Failure?

Failure is the unsucessful attempt at completing an intented goal. That’s it.

But that’s just the intended goal. The greatest lesson we could possibly learn from failure, which we always seem to miss, is to have the zeal to try again with equal effort. But ‘try again’ also seems to be a term we associate with ‘catching up’, ‘being slow’, ‘being behind’, and most deadly of all, as ‘another road of failure with no hope of success’.

But success can’t just be about attaining the goal, or finishing the task, or winning the race. So we must redefine below what ‘try again’ means to us.

Redefining ‘Try Again’

To re-attempt the task failed with the full intention, the full hope of succeeding, and to proceed enthusiastically in spite of many past failures.

But what is success but the product of many failures? But getting back up is not just about succeeding. Wanting to achieve a goal cannot be the only reason for trying again. We try again because we are excited by the opportunity given to us to try. We try again, because we are honoured with the new opportunity to try again, and not just that, but to do so with all the knowledge of past failures. We feel honoured to try again with experience.

Perceiving Success in Failure

We do not just fail. There was always something we did better comparing to our previous attempt, and there was always something we did that was admirable but which we thought was not worth acknowledging.

We’ve been trained from school to see mistakes as bad, and to always focus on the marks we lost rather than the marks gained. School has made vacuous any desire for growth and learning, but only facilitated cravings for approval from our educators. We fear mistakes, avoid being bold and creative, and repress the urge to seek for exta-ordinary, insightful solutions.

But in every mistake and in every failure there is the success in effort. The only true failure which we must seek to overcome, is trying without putting any genuine labour towards to the solution. Every task we do, we should try our best. There is no need for external validation - you are your own personal validator. We don’t work for a prize, and we don’t work for any reward, we work for the sake of the work itself. There are methods circulating online to create a personal reward system for completing a checklist - but honestly and crudely, why do you need to reward yourself for work you are privileged to have! No person who is able to read this post is hindered from working towards a goal that is meaningful to themselves.

But Why Try at all?

It is important to not get stuck in a sense of false urgency when working towards one’s goals. We should not feel so entitled that we become too busy for those around us. Whenever we feel ourselves strolling with too much seriousness from task to task, remember the humourous image of the street lamp which fell on a businessman huffing and puffing to his next errand, killing him and all his busy-ness.

It doesn’t really matter if we succeed or not, because all of us will die anyway. So we should not pin our happiness to an outcome, and find ourselves becoming stressed and busy striving to it. All that matters is that we attempt any task with courage, readiness, zeal, and joy, not worried about the outcome but rather about the effort we put.

Above all, try to accomplish things out of a desire to change for the better!