First of all, I want to wish you all the LOVE & CARE during this festive season. I hope you had a joyful DIWALI.
We are just beginning our journey towards true Fulfillment.
To become a better human being every single day of our lives!
And as Indian festivals go, another one is right at the corner when one passes by.
So on the eve of BHAI DOOJ (the Hindu festival where brothers & sisters exchange blessings & gifts), I want to share a real-life lesson I wrote about on Raksha Bandhan back in August.
You're going to love it.
Today, I wanted to touch upon the change that our minds go through when we face real setbacks in life.
SIT BACK, RELAX & ENJOY!
Now, I have learned a lot of life lessons from my young brothers & sisters over the years. For example, I could accumulate a lifetime of wisdom just seeing my sisters grow up (a big shoutout to ANNIE & PARI).
Like when each of them was just a couple of years old and was trying to take her first steps. It was so darn cute. And I, being a well-mannered elder brother, tried to playfully push her back down a number of times. She repeatedly fell down, and guess what! She tried AGAIN. Fell down to the floor again. And lo & behold, she tried AGAIN…and AGAIN. And then she tried some more!
It's in the raw human spirit, folks.
Our kids just know how to try. They don't have anything else in mind.
Sometimes she laughed. Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she laughed and cried at the same time. Oh, the precious moments!
I have chills already.
Anyway, she kept trying and trying… laughing and crying.
But most importantly, she did not label her experience as a 'FAILURE.'
She just enjoyed the activity with no definition of failure in her mind.
Unlike us adults, our babies don’t know the possibility of failure, so they happily keep falling down until one day they take a few steps and then a few more.
Before long, they’re jumping and running. All their trying (& failing) pays off.
THEY FALL, BUT THEY NEVER FAIL
When I was pondering over this thought in my own life, this idea of,
I did not know how to explain this.
Finally, I got the answer to this in a conversation with my mother. We were talking about one of the recent failures I had experienced in my life and what the next course of action must be. And not surprisingly, we had opposing views on the matter.
I saw the failure as just a stepping stone, learning from it, recalibrating my approach, and then trying again with the learnings from my mistake.
So, I simply asked my mother,
"When I was small & learning to walk, if a friend of yours would've come to our house and said, Hey! Your son has now been trying to walk for months & he has utterly failed. Make him stop trying now. IT'S TIME"
I continued,
"Mom, I'm sure you must have just given your friend a mouthful at the time and said, HEY. this is my son. He's going to keep trying. He's going to keep trying TILL THE TIME HE WALKS."
AHA! The magic formula, it seems.
No wonder almost everyone in the world walks.
You see, as grown-ups, what if we also simply CHOOSE not to fail?
Yes, you read it right.
It's a choice!
What if we treat our mistakes and failures as not things to be avoided, but things to be cultivated, to be craved?
Like Warren Buffett once said,
“You’re going to make mistakes.
You can’t play in the game without making any mistakes.
I don’t think about it, I just move on.
There are two things in life that you don’t get another chance at – marrying the wrong person and what you do with your children.
Business, you just go on.
It’s a mistake to dwell on mistakes, it’s unproductive."
Learn from them: Yes, definitely;
Fixate on them: No, I don't think so!
Thinking about the negative ways of looking at failure is like Mark Twain’s story about the cat that sat on a hot stove for the first time.
"The cat never sat on a hot stove again, but he never sat on a cold one again either.”
You will only be able to ACHIEVE YOUR TRUEST POTENTIAL by having at it yet again, but with a better mindset & skill-set, and the learnings from your past mistakes.
Life teaches us each day that stuff happens (and spare my language, sometimes sh.. happens!), but we DON'T need to give each of our experiences a LABEL.
GOOD, BAD, HARD, EASY, FAILURE etc. do not exist but as labels in our minds!
All we need to do to hold our heads high is to:
Break through these labels & simply Enjoy your experiences!
Failure can be your best friend. So allow it to be!
Lastly, a lesson I recently learned,
I hope you enjoyed this module, this tribute to My beautiful little sisters.
Until next time, tribe members!
I can't wait to see you in person one day in one of our live seminars.
Lots of LOVE
Stay safe
Be JOYFUL, get busy SERVING Humanity, and become truly FULFILLED in the process.
BONUS TIP
Let me share a famous historic figure's life story with you. This was a man who:
Failed in business at age 21.
Was defeated in a legislative race at age 22.
Failed again in business at age 24.
Overcame the death of his sweetheart at age 26.
Had a nervous breakdown at age 27.
Lost a congressional race at age 34.
Lost a congressional race at age 36.
Lost a senatorial race at age 45.
Failed in an effort to become vice-president at age 47.
Lost a senatorial race at age 49.
And finally, was elected President of the United States at age 52.
This man's name was ...
...
...
...
Abraham Lincoln. Could he have become president if he had seen these events in his life as failures?
It's highly unlikely.
Winners, Leaders, Masters, and Mentors - people with real internal strength - all understand that if you try something that does not get you your desired outcome, it's simply feedback. You use that information to make finer distinctions about what you need to do to produce the results you desire.
If you want to experience some more incredible "so-called" FAILURE - SUCCESS stories, then do SUBSCRIBE here and join your tribe of Value Stewards.
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Prateek Singh Kumar
