Failure is a Blessing in Disguise

Around six or seven years ago, I attended a chess class in Thane, where all the kids in the academy would play and practice with each other. I remember one boy very vividly, who used to just own everybody over there. I always seemed to have bad enough luck to be put against him in every match, and every time I was crushed, and suffered bitter defeats. This went on for a very long time, to the extent that I once lost the final round in a tournament on the top board to this very player! In just a few moves!

Obviously, I didn’t take this well at first. I remember shaking in my boots when seeing him opposite me with that knowing smile. The hour after the loss almost always observed me crying over the loss.

It would have been easy to back out at that moment. It felt like I had accomplished nothing, and that it was better to take the easy way out; to stop playing. This very pain is what all the famous personalities today have been through. People like Walt Disney, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk experienced the worst grief in their life back in the early days. In fact, in the case of the latter two, they were considered so incompetent that they were sacked from their very own company. Steve Jobs did not set foot in Apple’s offices for eleven years, from 1985 to 1996. However, he did not just wallow in sadness and anger for the rest of his life. Instead, he attempted at another Startup and even became chairman of Pixar, developing the wildly successful Toy Story. Eventually, he rejoined the board of Apple. If he didn’t persist, it would never have been the first ever trillion-dollar company.

Let’s move to Elon Musk. He experienced hardships from his childhood, and would continue to have them. He was ousted from his company, which went on to become PayPal. He struggled with rocket launches at SpaceX and nearly exhausted his entire savings, being a millionaire. Tesla came under many accusations of faulty design, and was repeatedly criticized by the media. Through the passion in his heart and the iron-clad determination, he continued to pull through and is now on a success wave. Once again, had he given up, the electric car and reusable rocket concept would not have been introduced.

Why am I telling you this? I think these great thinkers set a wonderful example of their life, successes and failures. Failure did not deter them, it simply drove them, increased their confidence, made them see their flaws, and rectify it to the best. This no-give up attitude is primarily the reason they are at such heights today.

Back to me and my struggles; I also subconsciously adopted a similar frame of mind, and prepared like an inner hell had been unleashed. I was going to prove that my failure can be overridden. Sure enough, a few months later, after a fierce one-and-a-half-hour game, I emerged victorious for the first time! It was a priceless moment, and looking back, I can’t help but think that it was the failures which made it all the more worth it. After all these years, I may not have been some whiz kid, but my determination to keep at it is what I treasure as an important quality of not accepting failure.

I would like to end with a quote by Steve Jobs in a famous Stanford Interview, 2005: “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that ever happened to me.”