All human activity is geared towards achieving success. From our childhood till our death, we are taught to aim for success in all the fields of life – school, play, work, relationships, finance, power, fulfillment of our endless desires etc. Every moment of our lives, we experience success and failures in endless cycles.
We do not wish to experience failure in our lives. It is embarrassing and it hurts. And this fear of failure prevents us from taking many chances, which leads to lack of successes in life and further failures. We can deal with failures in different ways.
We can give up and let go of our dreams and live without trying anything in life. This is an unacceptable approach as failures are necessary before we succeed and achieve. Failures give us road map to success. We must accept that failure is the other side of coin of success.
The other way is that we can try harder and put in more effort. Even this approach is not satisfactory as we must change our approach and try newer methods and means to achieve success.
You can treat failure as feedback and change your strategies and try again. We fail as we have used a wrong method or approach and when we change it, we get success.
What do we do when it rains failures from all sides and we feel it is the end of everything? The story of the donkey given below is an answer:
One day a farmer´s donkey fell down into an old dry well. The animal brayed for hours and his master the farmer finally found him. The farmer decided the donkey was old and there was no point in rescuing him; and that the old dry well needed to be covered up anyway.
He invited all his neighbors to come over and help him. They all grabbed a shovel and began to shovel dirt into the well. When the donkey realized what was happening, he cried horribly. Then he quieted down.
After shoveling some loads of mud, the farmer finally looked down the well and was astonished at what he saw. With every shovel of dirt that hit his back, the donkey was doing something amazing. He would shake the mud off and step on the mud and climb to a new level. As the farmer´s neighbors continued to shovel dirt on top of the animal, he would shake it off and take a step on the mud and climb on top of it.
Pretty soon, the donkey stepped up over the edge of the well and trotted off.
Sometimes, like the donkey in the story we are stuck in situations where life pushes us into a deep hole and shovels mud and dirt all over us. We must not get buried under it. We must shake the mud off our backs and step on it and slowly climb out of the deep hole.
We have the habit of celebrating our successes and not our failures. When we are successful, we are greedy for more successes. This makes us look at all others as threats and competitors. We do not share the joys of our success with all. We keep them only for ourselves. Where there is failure, we do not learn from failure and wallow in self pity.
The secret of dealing with failures is celebrating them as opportunities for further success. In this way we can always keep ourselves happy – during success and during failures which are stepping stones to success.
