Failures

There are some people who are blessed with talent and perseverance that they rarely experience failure in their life. These people unintentionally earn the ire of other people who often envy or become jealous of them.

Fortunately, I'm not one of them. I've had a wide spectrum of experiences during my life, from being popular and successful to sheer mediocrity and even one of the downtrodden and pitied.

Of course by now, failure it not something I'm afraid of. In fact, sometimes, I even welcome it. Why? It seems to me that there are two kinds of failures: those who learn from them, and those who don't. I'd like to think that I belong to the former.

A person I interviewed several years ago once told me that he'd hire someone who set up his own business and failed rather than someone who succeeded. Why? Because the former has experiences to draw upon and hopefully learned what worked and what didn't.

Of course the flaw in that argument is that it assumes the failure was paying attention and is the type that recovers from their errors. There are simply people who refuse to learn and keep on repeating the mistakes over and over again. And of course, there are also the people who instantly give up at the first sign of defeat...