Striving towards Excellence

I am going to toss the coin.

Do you want heads or the tails?

You want head. Let me throw the coin, asking you to keep the head and return the tail to me? Is one separable from the other? Likewise, distress and delight, agony and ecstasy, sorrow and joy, gain and loss, appointments and disappointments are all two sides of the same coin. And so is success and failure. Enjoy failure as much as you enjoy success.

We say we are comfortable. For example, let us say we are comfortably seated. Can we not enhance the comfort? Still more and still more and so on. Why not develop the same attitude toward pain? Why not increase the pain and increase the ability to bear the pain? Increase the threshold of enduring pain. This continuous process of enduring pain prepares you to accept pain as part of the game as we accept pleasure. What applies to comfort zone applies equally to discomfort zone.

Tips to aspiring entrepreneurs:

Accept not booking orders as part of the role you are playing as an entrepreneur. Don’t get frustrated. Don’t think you are good for nothing and that you are useless to the organization. You don’t know your potential. Let me narrate a story.

A farmer used to carry two pots of water to an ashram. One pot would be left at the ashram for the requirement of the ashram inmates and the other pot would be utilised to water the plants around the ashram. One day, one pot was telling the other pot that he was jealous of the other pot. When asked by the other pot for the reason, the pot said he was not useful as there is a hole in the pot and most of the water leaked out before the farmer started watering the plants. The pot felt that the other pot was doing a great job as the entire quantity was useful to the inmates of the ashram. The farmer who heard this told the pot that was feeling distressed, "Oh, my dear pot, don’t ever feel you are useless. Come with me and you will see the growth of plants en route to the ashram. This is due to the water that you have given by way dripping all the way." The moral of the story is that no one created by the Almighty is useless. You have great powers in you. Introspect, investigate, find them, put them to use and you will succeed.

If winter comes, can success be far behind? Unless there is the pitch dark of the night, where is the brilliant sunshine of the day?

Alexander Lockhart, in his book Peptalk, speaks of Thomas A. Edison's advice on overcoming failures:

First, one must have definite knowledge as to what one wishes to achieve.

One must fix one’s mind on that purpose with persistence and begin searching for that which one seeks.

One must keep on searching, no matter how many times one may meet with disappointment.

One must refuse to be influenced by the fact that someone else may have tried the same idea without success.

One must keep oneself sold on the idea that the solution of a problem exists somewhere and that they will find it.

Failure should challenge us to new heights of accomplishment, not pull us to new depths of despair. Failure is delay, but not defeat. Failure is not final but postponement of success. It is a temporary de-tour, not a dead-end street," so said William Arthur Ward. J. Paul Getty, encourages us to fail, says, "If you want to be a success, then double your failure rate. Only then will you double your learning experience to overcome future obstacles and defeats."

Keep this poem on your desk:

Failure does not mean I’m a failure:
It does mean I have not yet succeeded.
Failure does not mean I have accomplished nothing:
It does mean I have learned something.
Failure does not mean I have been a fool:
It does mean I had enough faith to experiment.
Failure does not mean I have been disgraced:
It does mean I dared to try.
Failure does not mean I don’t have it:
It does mean I have to do something in a different way.
Failure does not mean I am inferior:
It does mean that I am not perfect.
Failure does not mean that I have wasted my life:
It does mean that I have an excuse to start over.
Failure does not mean that I should give up:
It does mean that I must try harder.
Failure does not mean that I will never make it:
It does mean that I need more patience.The only people who never fail are those who never try.

Let’s enjoy failure as much as success! Success consists in converting failure into magnum opus triumphs.