Understanding what exactly is the key to success?

The thrill that you get when you win a race or when you get an amazing score on your test papers makes you feel great. Doesn’t it? But no matter how much success you have seen, you cannot deny the fact that nothing teaches you better than a failure. Failures do dishearten an individual but they can be life-altering. Each failure will give you a valuable lesson in achievement, empathy, learning and many other things if you just have the right eye to see it. Failure is not a step back but a stepping stone and the key to success. 

Sports scientists Dave Collins and Aine MacNamara observed in 2012 that athletes who had a stronger support system in the form of coaches and well-funded training programs had it too easy and lowered their chances of success. They also postulated that it is the journey down a bumpy road that leads to greatness as opposed to a smooth sail. 

Let’s dive into a few success stories and the lessons that failure teaches you to give you a more positive perspective.

Learning from the success story

Every success story has only one lesson at the end that failure is the key to success. One of the most inspiring stories is of the richest man in China, Jack Ma. He found success with his E-commerce venture Alibaba which is an online marketplace. We know of his successes but not of his failures, that in some way have led him here. He comes from a humble background, where adequate money was a luxury. When he decided to attend a college, he failed the entrance test twice but that did not deter him. He went on to give the test again and cleared it in the third attempt.

Once he was through college, he started applying to various jobs but everywhere he faced rejection. He was even rejected by KFC and out of all the people who applied for the job, he was the only one to be rejected. Even after this, he did not stop trying. Eventually, he got a job as a teacher and was loved by his students. During this time, the internet bug bit him and led him to explore more. But he hardly had any information about coding and technology. Still he decided to go ahead with a venture that serves as an online marketplace.

Alibaba sure is a big name today but when Jack Ma started, he had three failed ventures. Alibaba was the fourth venture for which Jack Ma managed to get funding and today he is the richest man in China. He failed multiple times at almost every step but he never let those failures dishearten him and continued working hard because he knew this failure would pave a way to success which did happen in the end. 

Lessons to learn from a failure

A failure is all about learning a lesson, setting the record straight and moving on. Never take failure too hard that you are not able to get over it and it ends up crushing your spirits. If you are presently going through a failure and are feeling a little down then read further to know the 5 lessons that any failure can teach you:

• Experience: So what if you failed, you got the experience. You definitely learnt something. The first thing you learnt is a better understanding of the subject matter and life. This is truly invaluable and will help you in making better decisions in the future by not repeating the mistakes that you made earlier.
• Learning: There’s hardly any probability of you getting things right in the very first attempt. So every time you fail, you learn something new. In the next attempt, you correct your mistake and try again. At every step, you are learning something new and correcting your results to get the best possible result. You will get a sense of direction everytime you hit a dead end.
• Resilience: An individual should always be prepared to face difficult situations. Failures teach you the art of resilience. If you will expect that you will never fail, then it is going to only disappoint you further. Instead, prepare yourself for tough times by getting over that fear of failure. Failure is the greatest teacher of all times and fearing it is like turning away opportunities that are custom made for you! 
• Growth: Life is all about growing and learning. Failures make you mentally strong and way more confident thereby giving you an opportunity to grow. Accepting that you were wrong and then moving on to try again for better results is another example of growth.  
• Value: Another lesson that failure teaches us is that of value. This is one of the most valuable lessons because facing failures is tough and succeeding is even tougher. Failures leave you disappointed but teach you the value of trying again and again. And eventually, when you succeed, these failures keep you grounded. So it enables you to value the right things that can pave the way for success.

These five lessons will definitely change your perspective about failures. Over the years, many papers have been published on this very topic which actually has proved that the setbacks make us more successful. And we all are already familiar with the saying that what doesn’t kill us makes you stronger. So yes, our failures do serve as a key to success. So keep at it. Keep trying to achieve your goals and in the process, you will surely achieve greater things. 

Here are some other resources from our blog that can give you the right dose of motivation to keep going:

• CAT 2020: Prepare for LRDI section with these smart strategies
• Answers to all your queries on taking and analysing CAT Mocks
• How to score 99+ percentile in CAT -By Srishti Jain, 99.9 percentile, IIM Ahmedabad
• How to devise a smart strategy for CAT preparation? -By Nitish P Nair, 99.67 percentile, IIM Bangalore
• My journey of increasing CAT percentile from 90 to 99 -By Siva Charan Sompalli from NITIE Mumbai
• From 60.70 to 98.21 percentile: The secret to getting calls from IIMs -By Anubahv Singh from IIM Lucknow - Part 1
• How to score 100 percentile in CAT -By Somansh Chordia from IIT Bombay