Thursday, December 01, 2005

He who makes no mistakes makes nothing

This is a proverb that should be taken seriously by all those who are scared to make decisions. For this has counters the biggest failure that most of us have, Failure and Mistakes. Fear of failure is the most common factor that limits human potential. Why do we fear failure? Because, the word failure in itself is synonymous with negativity.

But is failure so bad? I mean, if you don't fail, how will you learn. How will there ever be an advancement, if none of us have failed? Do we do the things right on the first attempt? Haven't we all learned lessons from the past failures and mistakes of the human kind. Isn't it because someone else or ourselves have failed or made the mistakes, that we know to avoid them now, without repeating them again and again.

We are bound to fail at least once in life. And because of the fear of failure, we do not attempt to go out and go for our dreams, we are making a bigger mistake than trying and failing. We are shutting down our own chances of success. Because of this fear, we are only going to give our dreams a half hearted chance at most. Because even when you make a go at it, with the fear of failure under your belly, you are already giving yourself only half the change. Your own mind is taking away the other half because of your fear. If your fear is bigger than your conviction then the net result is fear. So how can you expect your endeavors to succeed, when your net output is negative?

Is it interesting to delve deep and see why we fear failures and mistakes? Is the human race supposed to not to make any mistakes? I don't think so. The very reason why the human have become superior to other species is because we have the ability to bounce back from failures; to learn from mistakes. It is the lessons that were learnt from mistakes that helped the human race to advance. Thomas Edison failed 999 times before he could come up with the electric bulb. Had he given up at the first, second, tenth, hundredth or the five hundredth failure, what would have happened? Someone would have invented the electric bulb, but it wouldn't have been Edison!

I think the lesson from Edison is never small. It is one of the best lessons of perseverance and learning from mistakes. As Edison said, he did not fail 999 times, he just discovered 999 ways of it not working! That is the spirit that we should follow. If we fail doing what we were doing, then we should not give up, we should find out what went wrong and not make the same mistake again, the next time we try.

And it should be interesting to see why we fear failure. It's mainly because we fear the perception of others towards us, that we fear making mistakes. This world is full of specimist, that they expect everything to fail. They find it hard to believe that this world is full of possibilities. They fear the unknown and hence they prefer to stay in their cocoons and predict failure of everything, rather than the success of anything. It is their own fears that they try to impose on others. And everytime you embark on a new journey, you will come across atleast a few of them that will tell you exactly why you are doomed to fail. They will tell you plenty of examples of failures, but they will not remember any successes.

But, no matter what anyone says, I'd say, if you are convicted enough about your goal, go for it. If you believe in yourself, go for it. Even if you fail making a go for it is worthwhile. Simply put, you need to learn the lessons. You need to find out for yourself, the ditches and potholes. So you can avoid them the next time around. As the saying goes, forget the failure, but not the lesson. Don't forget, there's a lesson in everything that happens, if you look.

Also, there is another risk of never failing. Say, all that you try works out in the first attempt and if you never fail, you will become complacent and will lose your agility. You will go on not learning any lessons, and you get in to a bigger trap. And if you fail, then you would have lost your agility to get up and brush up, failure will hit you too hard.

So, never fear what others might say, never fear what the world will think. Dont fear mistakes or failure, they will only teach us a lesson. Remember - He who makes no mistakes makes nothing!

4 comments:

Sergey Biryukov said...

Great post, Sampath! Can I translate it into Russian for my LiveJournal blog?

Sampath said...

Hi Sergey,

Yes, please do by all means.

Cheers,
Sampath

Sergey Biryukov said...

Thanks. Here it is.

Anonymous said...

Great!
I like it really. We should do our best to achieve out goals!

Keep going man =)