I Do Not like to Fail

I have always enjoyed learning, and find it exciting and challenging. I remember my kindergarten teacher once taught me the concept of friction, and I tried it out with many different objects. It was fun. When I do not understand a concept quickly, I get frustrated. I don’t have the patience to learn it from someone else, and I just want to figure it out myself.  In front of people, I do not like to accept my mistakes, and I do not like to let people know I failed. This is how I was (maybe still somewhat), and I do not enjoy it.

During a chess game recently, when I lost, and my opponent shook my hand; I got so angry that I started telling him to shut up. You can tell that was embarrassing.

Last year, my brother and I did a charity sale of our toys, and we sold zero items. I was miserable. I had worked hard to create flyers and posted them outside my front yard one day in advance so people would know about it. I and my brother stood outside with the sale sign next to a table full of toys for 3 hours and not a single customer came to our table. Few people passed by, and we just smiled. My mom asked me later that night, “what was the biggest mistake in your sale?” I did not want to answer her or even speak with anyone about it. Deep in my mind I knew that I needed customers and my house was on a quiet street and not just the right place to do it.

Recently I was reading a book that had a question which caught my attention, “Would you rather try more ambitious things knowing you might fail or try easier things knowing you would succeed?” Obviously, I want to do ambitious things, it’s fun!

If doing ambitious things is fun, then failing should also be fun, and this is what I must learn. When we fail, we look over our mistakes, carefully spotting the miscalculations in our ideas. Failure and defeat are life’s greatest teachers.

I came across this amazing article on Michael Jordan: http://launching-a-leadership-revolution.blogspot.com/2011/10/failure-is-one-of-lifes-greatest.ht

Failures of famous people:

·       It took Thomas Edison 10,000 tries to make the light bulb!

·       In her lifetime, Emily Dickinson published less than a dozen of her 1,800 poems! After Emily Dickinson died, the rest of her poems were found

·     Vincent Van Gogh only sold ONE painting out of 900 in his life! The rest of his paintings were found after he died

Source: GoComics.com