Inevitability of Failure

For as long as I can remember I have always been told that if I work hard enough and want something bad enough, I will achieve it. As a child I grew up with the believe that my hard work will always be rewarded. That if I want something bad enough, I have to work hard to achieve it. And if I give it my absolute best, nothing can stop me from achieving my goals. So I did that, after all if all the elders kept saying this it had to be right. Wrong. They were wrong.

This mindset that we grow up with, that you can be anything you want to be if you work hard enough is just not applicable in real life.

Life is not fair and you don’t always get what you want, that’s the truth that should’ve been told to me as a kid. Hard work does not always equate to success. You can give your 100 percent to a task and still you may never achieve it.

Failures are a part of life and in my opinion just as important as success, sometimes even more so. We won’t always score as high as we expected, or get into the University we worked so hard to get into. We may never get our dream job. We may work our butts off and still never get that promotion. Some of our relationships will fail regardless of how much we love that person. Some of our peers will be more successful than us and some of them will achieve things that we wanted but never could. There will always be someone better than you out there, someone who’s more talented, more hardworking, more intelligent and that’s life.

There are so many factors that influence our outcomes, a vast majority of them totally out of our control. It’s okay not to succeed all the time and it’s okay to not be the best. We all will fail at some place in our lives. And that’s okay. Failure is a far better teacher than success. It will teach you about your own limitations, strengths and weaknesses. We need to stop fearing failure, we need to stop thinking that if we fail the world will end. We need to stop telling our children that winning is everything and if you fail then you’ll keep failing. It’s just not realistic or practical. Life is not about winning or being the best. It’s about learning and growing, it’s a process of getting to know your own self. It’s about falling down and then getting back up again. It’s about trying to be the best version of yourself and that means embracing your failures and being proud of all that you have achieved.