Written in March 2020
Failure: Salvation or Barrier?
Failure is something that cannot be avoided, something that is prior to every variant of success, something that is carved in one’s sculpture of life the moment one comes into existence. An infant can turn out to be handicapped as a result of failure in cell formation. A child may end up with his skull broken that might lead to agonizing injuries because he failed to pull the breaks at the right time while learning to ride a bicycle. A student might not get a degree because of his failure in understanding the subject enough. A nervous but talented man doesn’t get a job following the failure in his interview because his ideas and answers didn’t sound profitable enough for the company. The company might get down to bankruptcy because it failed to make the right investments. An old man who has lived through his days may not die a peaceful death because of his failures in life.
Thus failure is a collateral allotment that is guaranteed to you and something that comes at the cost of living an intelligible life. One simply cannot do away with it because just like any other human experiences, failure has a pivotal role to play in the development of your overall personality.
Failure can be broadly divided into two distinctive categories, i.e., personal failure and collective failure.
Astonishingly, collective failure can be considered the more common variant of failure. This is perhaps because in a machine, even if a single part malfunction, the whole thing stops working the desired way. In the same perspective, in a team, if a single member does not play his role correctly, the team is most likely to fail in what they want to accomplish. To be able to acquire the accomplishment desired, one must be cooperative with the other members of the group.
Another significance of collective failure is that it is not limited to the people who fail. Rather, if a group of people fail in a certain task, it can leave a major impact on the people and groups around them. In a science exhibition, if on the leaderboard there are the top three teams, and the one which has secured the first position is disqualified for some reason, the second team will take the first position, the third will take the second position and a team which was drafted into oblivion will get to maintain their prestige. In this perspective, the failure of the team which prior held the first position will come as a form of sadistic pleasure to the other three teams.
The brunt of collective failure varies from intelligence to negligence, and can encompass determining elements like understanding, compromising, dedication and so on and so forth.
Directing the attention to personal failure, which is a relatively more complex variant of failure but also presumably is more important for one’s development of personality.
A child failing to pass, a teacher failing to help the child pass, a parent failing to motivate the child, may sound like collective failure to many, but the child not passing is an individualistic failure of the teacher, the parent, and the child himself. A politician failing to deliver his promises to the public, a mathematician failing to solve an equation, a lawyer failing to give his client the upper hand in a case, a judge failing to serve justice, an analyst failing to predict an attack before it happens, is all their individualistic failures. Personal failure can be a result of psychological or physical disorder, and lack of dedication.
Likewise collective failure, it isn’t limited to the person who failed but leaves an impact on others. In a race, if a runner fails to run fast enough, the competitor behind him takes his place. If a student fails to score 92% in the examination, the student with 90% holds the first position in the class. If an employee is fired, the employee below his post takes his place with a better income.
Failure fulfils a variety of functions in the life and personality of a person; It can cause personality degradation or can further personality development. Therefore, we can speak of the ambivalent nature of the failure. The elementary problem, encountered in failure, is to give failure a meaning. To do this one must ask about the past, ‘Why did I fail?’ This ultimate question not only makes it easier to explain the issue but to also recognize failure as the origin of human existence.
If king Nicolas De Francis wouldn’t fail in delivering the people of France, The French revolution would’ve never taken place and France would never have been ruled by a king elected by its people. If Albert Einstein wouldn’t fail to blend in schools, we wouldn’t be having the Theory of Relativity. If Steve Jobs passed college, we wouldn’t be having the iPhone. If Joseph, the descendant of King James, was a king, we wouldn’t be having Jesus! And speaking in a more mythological perspective, if Eve and Adam had not eaten the apple of Eden, the human race wouldn’t be having the sense of the truth and the falsehood.
As a consequence, individualistic failure is extremely complicated, intricate and tortuous in comparison to collective failure, and thus elements of which are more formidable and onerous than any else fathomable. In the same context, one man’s failure can also be perceived as another man’s pleasure. For some, seeing someone failing in a certain task is adequate enough to fulfil their sadistic thirst.
As emphasized above, one cannot escape or cheat failure. But why do we need it in the first place? What makes failure so special? Once a young reporter asked Alexander Graham Bell during an interview after he invented the telephone, "How, sir, did it feel to fail two hundred times?" to which he firmly answered, "I didn’t fail two hundred times, young man, it was nothing more than a two hundred- step process." If failure is inevitable, I believe, it surely can be revived. In computers, when given a command, it processes through millions of binary codes to find the adequate output and each of the times, it either gets zero or one. And each time it skips a code, it fails to process it which brings it back to the initial point. On this Alan Turing, the great British mathematician, computer scientist and cryptographer said, "If failure is not to be considered a crucial step, computer science is perhaps the most gigantic failure the modern time has ever seen."
When Winston Churchill became the Prime Minister of England under the pressure of the Second World War, in a meeting he said, "Kingdoms burnt to the ground rise from the ashes of its ruins and those that do not know the taste of defeat are devastated to particles." I cannot agree more.
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