Dealing With Failure

It's funny how I've been meaning to post updates here since my exams ended in February, marking the end of one academic session that never seemed like it'd end, and haven't really been able to. Now that I have a little chance, and have been reminded over and over again by a couple of people that they've been expecting something new, I just thought I'd quickly 'pen down' a little something.

So I decided I'd write about dealing with failure today. It's something virtually all of us have dealt with at one point in our lives or the other, but it's also something the vast majority of us suck at dealing with. Failure can come in as many ways as you can imagine, though it usually seems to revolve around not meeting up with certain moral, academic, spiritual or financial (you name it) standards we might have set for ourselves or believe we are expected to attain. You know what's more? Failure's even more painful when we consider ourselves too big, too smart, too wise or experienced to have made certain errors. Truth be told, as I'm sure we've all heard a million times already, no one is above mistakes. No one!

No matter how big you believe yourself to be beyond certain mistakes, if they're meant to happen for you to learn something from, they'll happen. And guess what? If they occur and you still don't learn the right lessons, they're definitely going to happen again and again until you pick up what you're supposed to, learn the lessons you have to, and move on stronger. So the question is, how do you deal with failure? With a little insight from Wikihow, this is what I came up with.

Expect mistakes. To expect the process of living to always be smooth sailing is to invite a lack of realism into your life. It happens to the best of us. Failure helps to create balance in your life and presents an opportunity for personal growth.

Accepting the inevitability that things won't always go your way is an important part of avoiding becoming bitter. Learn to control perfectionism if you realize it's a trait that's holding you back in life. It causes us to fear failure and to feel we're personally a failure when we're faced with it. Seeking to always be perfect sows our own seeds of disappointment. Trying and failing is a much better teacher of what it means to be human than never trying and never succeeding.

Learn to love finding out that you're wrong about something. That's not failure; it's enlightenment and the path to finding the right way. Never stop believing you are good enough. The real difference between people who become successful and overcome failure and those who do not comes down to how you manage failure and how you view its impact on you. Feeling inadequate is a commonplace human feeling that even very public, very successful people feel but they don't let it keep them down. You are good enough; all you need is to give yourself the go-ahead to keep trying. Remain calm, and don't take your anger out on others. Too much success can sometimes lead us astray and cause us to grow an unwarranted sense of being infallible and feeling superior to others. Respect the humility that comes with failure.

Last but not least, review what lessons failure has taught you and learn to laugh. The greatest thing you can do for yourself during failure is to inject humour into your reflection of what happened. Forget about what other people think about you. Visualise each failure as a stepping stone to a stronger, more resilient self. Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper for “lacking imagination” and “having no original ideas.” Steve Jobs at the age of 30 was unceremoniously removed from the company be started. Oprah Winfrey was demoted from her job as a news anchor because she wasn't “fit for television.” The Beetles were rejected by Decca Recording Studios who didn't like their sound and said they had no future in Showbiz. Need I tell you what huge successes these ones eventually turned out to be?

P.S: I'll be writing major exams in no time...alongside a lot of other things which I need special grace for. Please pray for me!