Failure is ok ....

Thomas Alva Edison the great inventor is behind so many inventions, like a storage battery, a Dictaphone, a mimeograph and many more which we are not aware of. The most famous one among them is a light bulb. Its said that he tried making a light bulb for like 10,000 times and failed as many times. Its only after that that he finally got the light bulb to lit up. After that the great man says that ‘failure is ok’, failure teaches you how ‘not to do a thing’. After those 10,000 tries, he says, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

That was 1879, now is 2009, around 130 years later. Now see how relevant is that famous quote of his.

Ever since our childhood days we have been bred for success, not failure. I can remember many of my friends who were reprimanded if they did not get the first rank in their class, they would cry, this is the case with everyone. We never talked about people who failed. Somehow there is a negative emotion related to failure. If you fail you are not good enough to live a respectful life in this world. Everything is gauged by the material success that he has achieved. By how many marks he has scored in the related exam, how many lakhs (make it crores ) of rupees he has in his bank. By what kind (or say what level) of restaurant, he goes to for his lunches and dinners.

We some how never look to find how many hours have we been able to spend with our family and friends in the last month. Some quality time I mean. We some how never look to find out how happy or satisfied we are, when we go to our bed for sleep. We some how never look to find the happiness that’s there in the daily walk towards our work place.

We somehow miss the fun of our daily meals in the mess cause we are too busy trying to figure out what all we have to do in the coming days, the assignments, the presentations, the other ‘important’ things in life. Try this: ask yourself what had you eaten yesterday for dinner. You didn’t get it right, right? You got it right ? Well then I can assure you, you don’t have any submissions soon.

We tend to bask in the glory of our past performance, how we had achieved this and that. We are going to think through what we are going to do in our future. Both ways we are not living in the present. We miss the fun, the simplicity of a small child who walks past us and gives a smile to us. We miss to smile cause somehow we are so busy with our thoughts of past and future that we miss our present.

A big shot professional from an international company, will not be able to be with her wife during the delivery of their first baby. Why ? Cause he is a ‘thorough professional’ who has to leave the country for a ‘very important’ foreign assignment. That’s called success. I call it failure.
Failure for me is not, not getting marks in a particular exam, or not being the topper. Failure for me is the feeling that oh I didn’t give it my 100% and thus I didn’t get through.

Failure for me would not be, when I will not have enough money in my entire life to have dinner in Hotel Taj. Rather failure for me would be when I will not have my family and friends to have dinner with, no matter what the restaurant. Cause I was too busy to spend time with them, that’s classic failure.

Failure is not when you don’t get selected in very good institutions like IIM A or SCMHRD (that feels good). But failure is when we stop trying. Failure is not when you have had a blow on your head from your opponent, no that’s not failure. Failure is when you stop fighting only cause you are scared of another blow on your head, that’s failure.

So I say ‘live in the present’, don’t give it away for your future, cause you never know, ‘kal ho na ho’. Be a professional and thorough one I say, but not the one who doesn’t have time to be with his wife when she needs you the most. Don’t give away the ‘real’ life for the material success. Cause at 70 when you are sipping tea on one fine evening sitting in a bungalow in some posh location in Delhi or Mumbai, you don’t want to have the feeling that I wish I had done this, I wish I had done that. If that feeling comes into you at that age, the time has passed to do something about it. That’s real failure.

Zindagi rocks !!!!