After June 12th, when the UPSC Prelims exam results came out, I received a bunch of emails from people who did not qualify. Many were dejected and called themselves ‘a failure.’
But what is failure really?
Here are two ways to think about failure.
- Failure as an event: You do an experiment in a lab and it fails. You try to hit a shot in cricket, and you fail to connect with the ball. And so on.
- Failure as an identity: Just the way some people are musicians, writers, and software engineers, you think of yourself as a failure. As if ‘failure’ is what you do for a living (like a software engineer codes for a living).
Which one does your failure look like? I am yet to come across the second type.
I have done a lot of life experiments and some have bombed spectacularly. But that doesn’t make me a failure.
Success is an event. And so is a failure.
There is no such thing as ‘I am a failure’ — that is just a story in your head.
That story is misplaced and only leads to self-sabotage. So drop that story today. And start again. Do one more experiment with life.
– Rajan