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:
Source: GoComics.com
