Over the past few days quite a few things have been going wrong. I am talking about several aspects of my life. The situation did seem grim initally. However, with a little bit of self-confidence, hard work, help of friends and I might add luck as well, I have emerged better off than I was before the calamity started. As part of this process of recovery, some concepts, have been reinforced in a more concrete manner than they were prior to these problems. These concepts are:
1. You always learn a whole bunch more from failures, than you do from a simple, straight-forward success.
I believe that no one will disagree with me when I say that the taste of success sure is sweet, but what is wrong to take so much pleasure from one success so as to become negligent of facts and fail to do a critical analysis of reasons for success. Life is a battle, everyday. This being the nature of life, it is best to convert every *attempt* at doing *anything* into a learning opportunity. Such an attitude helps in making one's character more resilient and *silently* self-confident. It maybe argued here that success implies victory, so what more is left to fight for if one has already won. This would be true, if life was a single *shot* affair. But, the fact is that life is *always* a fight, a daily one. While some aspects of life are under our control, the others are simply not. Hence, one may not always achieve success but there is also a chance of failure. The reason why failures help are because they make you much more prepared for the next battle as compared to a success. ( This does assume however, that one is willing to learn from one's mistakes !)
Another related aspect is the more battles you fight, the more prepared you are for the ones which are waiting for you. Here, the term battle is loosely used to mean *attempts* at achieving something, without caring for failure. The more one is obsessed with a potential failure, the more one gets discouraged from trying something. Therefore, one should never be shy of trying something new. As they say, leaving your comfort zone makes you a stronger person.
2. Hard work *always* pays.
Over the years, I have had some very vivid examples of the above, proven to me in a very direct manner. What has varied is the duration over which your hard work will pay, but for me I have found it always does. This lesson was reinforced again during the recent /battles/. When I say hard work, I especially mean hard work in areas which you are passionate about, and where you have *not* been asked to do that work by anyone else. Such activity is, to put it in another way, *pure* because it has not been performed due to any external prompting, but has been done completely due to your own passion. There is a chance that the quality of work while undertaking such an activity will be high, simple because it is borne out of an innate interest.
