Socien's Blog

Few advise that you need not to punish a kid who fails. Because as failure becomes scary and a thing to run away from, the kid activates blaming gears when s/he can’t win it all, and do all s/he can pass every exam and trial. Most prefer to punish. They believe if a certain train driving the failure goes unpunished the kid becomes a bad one. All these varying direct and indirect teachings about failure, I call them failure education.

The best quality of one who has achieved the highest rank of “failure education” is his/her unmatched ability to learn from failure. Failure is easily convertible into success through easy means. It is hard to learn from failure if you don’t believe that it was you who failed for yourself. Whenever you fail it is important to understand that it is not about failure that you fail. It is about getting to your winning point.

If you are a parent do not explain failure in your life in ways that cast the blame on someone in the presence of your kids. Whatever explanation you choose, you are either teaching your kids to be responsible and tolerate failure so that they can learn from it. Or run away from failure, hate it and cast the blame on someone. Choose “I failed because I” instead of “I failed because they”. Do this even if you know that some external interference was one of the reasons behind your failure.

Being a parent is one way to keep revisiting the failures in the past, your kids being your audience. Whether your kids will be asking about your failures or not, you will involuntarily have to tell them. They learn from your example. If you are such an example who casts the blame onto people your kids will replicate you.

When you do not tolerate failure and or take full responsibility when you fail, you will be left with failures that are not yours to learn from. Failure is a great teacher. But it is just hard to learn from failures that are not yours. Your failures know where you lack and teach you along those lines. By casting the blame on someone, you are throwing away failure along with its lessons that were supposed to be yours.

The thing or the person you blame as the cause of your failure is an obstacle to your success, right? No!! If you cast the blame on someone, you emerge as the only obstacle between you and your breakthrough. By the way, I approached a family member intending to get capital. He failed to grasp the substance of my ideas and charged that he was only ready to help me with more college learning, which was more expensive than providing me with capital. My meeting with him inspired me to write the article “Why won’t rich relatives help with capital? How to or not change their minds?“

If you don’t interrogate closely, some people you blame have already helped you to get closer to your goal. Blaming them may erase their contribution. If I had walked out of the meeting feeling rejected and failed it could have been worse. But I walked out of it with one of my favourite articles to add to my collection, an article which could have been harder to write without our discussion. Listen!! As long as what you assume to be the reason for your failure, and is external and you blame it so, is there, you will never see your success. Because:

• You have fewer chances of changing some other people’s ways of thinking and doing. But you have more chances to change yourself. Remember you are the only person who calls yourself “me”.
• The journey to success is 90% self-improvement than walking towards success and rubbing shoulders with successful people. By blaming you have signed a contract with your inner self to insist on forgetting to improve the self through lessons from failure.
• You become an obstacle to your success when fail to bring into your system conditions and prerequisites to self-improvement.

Conditions and prerequisites to success come through, or through understanding that:

• Breaking out of thinking cycles with blaming in them.
• You are not invited to live your life. You are entitled to live it. And you cannot live it properly for you, no one will. Proper ways to succeed are blame-free.
• Your life is a once and for all limited tenure. Before you expire, improve yourself and understand that blaming is the furthest you can put yourself from achieving success, learning from failures and unlucky potential.
• The decline of others warrants the rise of others. Kill blame in your system to emerge successful.
• Developing a system that permits or tolerates failure. This, I tell you, is the greatest investment you can make in your life.
• After all, don’t wait to be given free. History is made through pain welcomed and endured until it becomes strength. If they can’t give you free don’t blame them.