2019-10-18 failure

RECENTLY, I read a book "tuesdays with Morrie", there's a saying in it:"Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live." I couldn't agree more. Everyone knows we're going to die, but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently. Thus, we would live differently. So we kid ourselves about death. But there's a better approach, to know that you're going to die, and to be prepared for it at any time. That way you can actually be more involved in your life while you're living.

Not only death, failure is also the topic everyone tries to avoid talking about especially when parents teach their kids. Parents don't talk about it at all, or when they have to,they try to make it sound easy. Actually it's not easy at all. We kid ourselves about failure, exactly as we do about death. When I was a student, like all boys I loved playing games and I was always good at games. Spending more time playing and less studying, I wasn't the best student in the class. But my scores were still high enough to keep me in the best middle school and the best high school in the area where I lived in. They said I was smart. I never got the chance to know what failure is until Gaokao, the Chinese college entrance test, to many people it's the first battle in their life. It's mine, too. I, however, lost it. It was my first taste of failure and was also a taste of failures to come. After one year's efforts, I failed again. I had heard of successful stories of those who got in Tsinghua or Peking University after two or three times taking the test, but I couldn't afford another one dark year all alone again. Both having failed entering the ideal universities, my friend and I decided to apply ourselves in college and four years later, after years of burning the midnight oil, I failed again.  My friend, who got the full prize scholarship studying abroad in Japan, persuaded me to take another shot. Take another shot? I didn’t. I quit, accepting my failure, the fact that I was not a test material. But quitting doesn’t mean stopping. Knocking down by failures in test, I pushed myself even harder in real life. I got up early in the morning, trying to squeeze two more hours out of a day. I faced turndowns in business world everyday but tried hard to close deals anyway.

Seven years later, my friend is going to obtain her doctorate next fall and become a woman doctor and here I am. Comparing myself to her, how successful she is and how unsuccessful I am.

No! Life is not defined by only one factor. I like what I do right now and I'm good at it. Years of working experience helped me become a small business owner and our efforts make it look promising in the future. The only thing I may regret a little bit is that I couldn't failed earlier, and thus I could have realized earlier: how important and necessary to learn how to fail and how to be prepared to fail. We only learn how to success rather than how to fail. How can we define success without knowing and being prepared for failure.

Life is like a war. It consists of numerous battles. You win a lot and you lose more. Like I said, quitting and losing doesn't mean stopping. Having some failures under our belt, we lose battles but win the war.