By all means, please fail

For the sake of argument

Failure is failure is failure is failure is failure. Does it make sense to you? Maybe, if you are really good at keeping track of things. Otherwise this will simply spark troubling thoughts about life being a complete disaster. Maybe you've been told this before, but latching yourself to the past will not get you out of difficult situations. Get up, dust yourself off, and start again: make this the mantra you live by.

All the people whom we now admire and look up to have at some point in their long careers failed. The one thing anyone will learn from them is that it is okay if you fail. It should not by any means be embarrassing. Long gone are the days of your younger years when at school even a slight sign failure would result in you exiling yourself from the company of your friends and teachers. Did you know that Sir James Dyson, the inventor of the bagless vacuum, went through 5,126 failed prototypes of his invention before finally the 5,127th one worked? He did so over 15 years, licking clean all his savings. However, ever since then, his Dyson brand has become a bestseller in the US and now Mr. Dyson himself is worth an estimated $4.5 billion dollars.

Stay true to your convictions
Being able to combat failure and disappointment during ones career is a very important learning process in itself. It gives you the strength, resilience and more importantly patience that helps form the persona that people need to eventually succeed in ones career. Between getting published for the very first time six years back and the time I finally became a contributor for this paper, I had an extremely unproductive five year long gap.

I did not stop getting published because I stopped writing. Rather no matter how much I tried to raise my standard of writing, it was never quite good enough. Within those five years, I had had to deal with the gush of troubling thoughts and emotions going through my head, and people questioning my talent on a regular basis. If it had gone on for a bit longer, they might have started to look at me like one of those people who never quite lived up to the hype – or I might have started to do it myself. Over the past couple of years, I have managed to discover my true potential as a writer and of course my preferred writing style. I have questioned myself numerous times and rethought about what my actual priorities in terms of my career are. But at heart I knew this is the field that I belong to and I made it a point that I would get myself here.

Being able to come out of failure and establishing yourself as a successful person and a person of ambition can be a very hard thing to achieve. One needs to have a fighting spirit to be able to come back a bigger and a better person. The one person I have been thinking about on a regular basis as I wrote this write up is our own national poet Kazi Nazrul Islam. He had often been questioned, demeaned, and at times even frowned upon because of the things he wrote and the personality he maintained. But look at where that got him in the end! He was given the highest status a literary personality can attain within a country – he is the national poet, and his name itself is synonymous to the spirit of rebellion.

But it's okay to change your course
When things do not go the way you expect them to go, please do not be disheartened. Sometimes it is okay to rest your brain and take some time for introspection. Failure often forces people to think out of the box and be innovative–and that is not always a bad thing. Vera Wang, the editor-in-chief of Vogue, was initially part of the US National figure-skating team, but when she did not make it to the Olympics she ended up shifting careers altogether. She started designing a long way down. She made her first wedding-gown at the age of 40 and now she is one of the best designers in the industry, with her business being worth over a billion dollars.

Your life WILL be one of ups and downs. Nonetheless, remember, failure is only a part of it. You will need to focus on being better, rather than being just good – because the world would never have remembered Alexander the Good, would they? Be very specific about what kind of success you want to achieve and focus yourself in it. Start being comfortable with the uncomfortable because that is how most things in life are. And try to be more respectful of your surroundings and realistically optimistic at the same time because that is the kind of people the world seems to be in need of right now. As I sign off I suddenly stumble upon an Ellen DeGeneres quote, "When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important."