Get comfortable with failures

Failing has always had a negative connotation to it. Failed business, failed in school, failed marriage etc. I was introduced to the word very early in my life, i remember it as early as 1st grade. “If you fail at exams you will not get a job and your life will be hard” i remember one of my school teachers saying that to me. Since then, “failing” has always been a huge deal and something to avoid for me personally.

I remember I had failed twice in academics once in a General Knowledge exam in 7th grade and at Engineering Drawing in my first year of engineering. Personally it was disappointing and dented my confidence to some degree. But that’s all the “failures” that I can remember right now. I have failed immensely at other things as well, but for some reason they didn’t bother me. Maybe because it wasn’t too important or maybe i didn’t put any effort towards it.

I started building products a couple of years ago with the aim of making some money. The longer goal is to generate multiple streams of revenue so that i can get out of 9–5 and do other things that interest me.

In these couple of years i have failed multiple times and each time i failed i felt the same despair and disappointment i felt when i failed in school and grad school. In those moments of despair I came across multiple posts of people who I look up to, who went through the same experience as I was going through.

This was a moment of realization of many things

• “Success” doesn’t happen overnight.
• Failures are a part and parcel of any creative process, you cannot avoid it.
• Yes there are some overnight successes, but most of times it is luck (not trying to belittle the efforts). It’s not in your control.
• You have to get it right just once. Once you figure out what works, just do it over and over again.
• Don’t hesitate to experiment.

But the most important of all, get comfortable with failures. You will fail, over and over again but what matters is how quickly you bounce back from it and get back to work. It’s going to require a lot of mental effort to rewire my brain to get comfortable with failure after holding the idea of “failures is bad” for decades. But i am gonna try. If i fail at it, i will try again 😇!

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