Failure as kick-start

A friend sends an SMS: What is success? Can we take the opposite of failure as success? At times you may feel you have neither failed nor succeeded. In a way, you could call that too success because there are no failures in your life!

My point: No one is safe from failure. But if you are the kind of person who owns failure and analyses it, then you are a winner; because as they say, failure is the first step to success. True, you have to take failure in the right spirit like those great achievers in history who took it as a challenge.A shining, recent example of success is that of WhatsApp owners: Brian Acton’s job application with social media giant Twitter was rejected in 2009. But that hardly hit him; instead he took it as an opportunity to do better things in the days ahead. A few months later, he got another jolt when his job application was rejected by Facebook too. This time he was determined all the more to prove that he can do and will do. He twitted: “What if Facebook turned me down. It comes as a great opportunity to connect with some fantastic people. Looking forward to life’s next adventure.”

True to his word, his next adventure was teaming up with another one of his mindset—his Yahoo colleague Jan Koum. Together, they built in less than four years what we know today as WhatsApp that found Facebook as a buyer for a mindboggling sum of $19 b recently. The moral: Failures have seeds of success in them; you have to take it as a challenge.

Many a time, failure happens not because of your ‘inability’ but because of the inability of the recruiter to see the potential in you. They usually look for “brilliant but normal” candidates. A brilliant guy with normal attitude and approach towards life can never get him even a footnote in history.