Failure is not the opposite of success….
…. it is “excuses”
Last weekend, when my friend, Vijay Chandramohan, and I were catching up, on a particular topic, Vijay said “if you think about it, failure is not the opposite of success, it is actually excuse(s)”. I found this quite profound. It is commonly said and understood that success and failure are at the opposite ends of a spectrum. When you don’t succeed, it is considered failure. Many call it failure. In a sense this is correct too. You failed to achieve your objective — you fell short. But it is also true that behind every success, there typically are a series of failures. Success does not emerge out of vacuum. A series of steps and interim milestones eventually end up in crossing the final milestone which is then termed success. But many of us fail to execute few or many of these interim steps properly while executing a few others successfully. But we don’t give up. We try to understand what went wrong, identify root causes, correct them and move on. This failure at interim milestones makes final success possible. These failures become pathway for success. In the process, we end up understanding more about the world, discovery more about ourselves and also achieve the end result. So, it is actually more than success — it is success++.
How do we react when we fail to achieve our objective — this has a disproportionate impact on how we progress in our lives. If we rationalize our shortfalls with excuses, it is likely that we get used to justifying failures and get accustomed to achieving less than what our potential allows or what our younger selves aspired for. After a while, we run the risk of not aiming high enough — of resetting our benchmarks for ourselves. This could sometimes degenerate into victim mindset because we will start looking for excuses — we will look for external reasons to pin the blame on. Rationalize how we may, blame the circumstances as much as we may, the long term impact will be on our self-image and self-worth. We end up reinforcing the fragility of our ego. As opposed to becoming someone who is fearless of aiming big and achieving big, we end up being someone who takes masochistic pleasure in complaining about their circumstances but with no intention of doing anything to change these circumstances. We end up resetting our potential path forward from an upward sloping line to a flattish one.
“We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.” ―Rudyard Kipling
Failures have the potential to increase robustness on the path to success; they increase confidence, fine-tune the method/process, raise the odds of success and render ultimate success incidental. The increased confidence behind this effort allows one to take on bigger goals later on. This can lead to a virtuous cycle of increasingly upward sloping potential path for one’s life.
Whereas accepting failures, rationalizing them and coming up with excuses to justify them will eventually lead to underselling our potential and capability to ourselves, entitlement mindset and finding ourselves as victims of our circumstances.
I did not get that promotion because my boss is not mature (or unreliable or selfish or partial or …) enough to see my contribution OR my employer is going through a bad business phase OR COVID-19 put a severe limit on promotions….
OR
I did not get promoted because I misunderstood how value is measure OR I did not check-in sufficiently with my boss on my progress OR my personal culture and my employer’s culture do not align well etc.
“He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.” — Benjamin Franklin
If you are not willing to identify the root cause and take corrective action(s) to overcome that cause, your original goal may not be met in the future as well. There are always situations where it could just be your bad luck that has held you back. Even in such situations, it is important to identify luck as the cause and do something about it. Sometimes it means, waiting it out and many other times it could be doing something to change your luck. To a large extent, good luck can be manufactured — like all good things in life it requires effort and time but surely can be manufactured. Good luck generally hovers around the intersection of hard work and risk-taking.
Next time you face a setback, you may want to seriously consider if you want to rationalize it with excuses or take accountability for it? And yes, I’m reminding myself too.
