This morning I woke up after half a nights sleep - woozy, hungover, disoriented yet happy. I'm in a strange country with no idea how the next week or the remainder of my life is going to shape up. Walking out into the blistering cold, a thought struck me like a bolt of lightening - I'm setting myself up to fail, and that's a good thing.
Growing up in India I have lived the life of two people - the juvenile delinquent and the man with a late start. The former was a stress free life. I lived for the day and loved for the moment. There was no worry about the future and there was no care about the past. Life was easy, priorities were clear and responsibility was an alien notion. As I failed at all that mattered, failure became who I was. My successes were so severely misguided that they were in effect more painful that failure. In all this behavior, the one thing that I exuded unknowingly was selfishness. People around me, my parents, were pouring in effort, time, resources and most importantly hope into me and all I did was waste. My false bravado and shallow machismo mixed lethally with immaturity so as to blind me and leave me in a state of limbo where eventually the biggest loser would be me, as a result of self destruction.
Everyone has a turning point in their life. Every boy turns into a man indeed overnight, as does every girl into a woman. The average Joe that is yours truly was no different. Unfortunately this was rather late in the day. By then the big pieces of life had already fallen and made a foundation that would determine the future, the cards were half dealt. From there on it has been a constant uphill battle, laden with fun and failure.
So why is it so important to fail? To understand that we must think of what motivates us. For some failure is an escape, for others a challenge. For the escapists failure is the perfect alibi. For the fighter, it's motivation.
In the jungle of life, resilience is such a rare bird that I always stop to take notice of it. Rolling with the punches, navigating through life, at the end of the day the man who shoots above his weight; the man who bites the bullet; who takes the difficult way out; who stands when he knows he will fall again is the man who eventually wins - if nowhere else, but in his own heart.
So I urge you, fine ladies and gentlemen of the world, to fail. For having not failed is having not tried hard enough, and that in itself is the biggest failure of all.
Growing up in India I have lived the life of two people - the juvenile delinquent and the man with a late start. The former was a stress free life. I lived for the day and loved for the moment. There was no worry about the future and there was no care about the past. Life was easy, priorities were clear and responsibility was an alien notion. As I failed at all that mattered, failure became who I was. My successes were so severely misguided that they were in effect more painful that failure. In all this behavior, the one thing that I exuded unknowingly was selfishness. People around me, my parents, were pouring in effort, time, resources and most importantly hope into me and all I did was waste. My false bravado and shallow machismo mixed lethally with immaturity so as to blind me and leave me in a state of limbo where eventually the biggest loser would be me, as a result of self destruction.
Everyone has a turning point in their life. Every boy turns into a man indeed overnight, as does every girl into a woman. The average Joe that is yours truly was no different. Unfortunately this was rather late in the day. By then the big pieces of life had already fallen and made a foundation that would determine the future, the cards were half dealt. From there on it has been a constant uphill battle, laden with fun and failure.
So why is it so important to fail? To understand that we must think of what motivates us. For some failure is an escape, for others a challenge. For the escapists failure is the perfect alibi. For the fighter, it's motivation.
In the jungle of life, resilience is such a rare bird that I always stop to take notice of it. Rolling with the punches, navigating through life, at the end of the day the man who shoots above his weight; the man who bites the bullet; who takes the difficult way out; who stands when he knows he will fall again is the man who eventually wins - if nowhere else, but in his own heart.
So I urge you, fine ladies and gentlemen of the world, to fail. For having not failed is having not tried hard enough, and that in itself is the biggest failure of all.
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