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Confessions of a Born Failure




Failure and I are twins.  We have coexisted happily for years now.  It wasn’t fun in the beginning.  The problem was that I never liked to fail.  So in those early years I did what one of the idioms in my mother tongue, Malayalam, describes as ‘roll where you fall’ meaning make your fall appear as not a fall but a roll that you chose.  However, eventually that becomes quite boring.  Moreover, the onlookers will understand your trick sooner than later. 

One of the fundamental and irrevocable truths of life is that people love losers.  Losers make people feel comfortable with themselves.  Another such truth is that it is easy to fail than succeed.  Ask the bulb man Edison who reportedly counted 10,000 failures on the way to illuminating the world with his bulb.  That was a neat number: 10,000.  Lucky man Edison was to get such a neat number of failures unless he was being metaphorical. 

I find James Dyson a greater consolation.  He gives us a more convincingly accurate figure of his failures on his way to the invention of the vacuum cleaner: 5126.  Dyson knew that failure was more natural than success.  Otherwise he wouldn’t have kept count of his failures.  But I guess he knew he wasn’t beating on a wall hoping that a door would materialise sooner or later.

I was also trying to create a door for myself.  Every time my door was about to take the final shape some mysterious force would come and decimate it.  The force didn’t come from some other world.  There was nothing supernatural about it.  I had a benefactor who convinced himself that whatever doors I created were not good for me.  Very, very few people, as far as I have understood, are as privileged as I am to have such a benefactor.  The benefactor is my twin.

Now I have got used to failures so much that any success would shatter me.  In fact, I feel a tremendous lot of gratitude to my benefactor for making me such a failure.  It is easy to fail.  It takes no effort.  Life is much smoother now. 

This is written for Indispire Edition 182 which asked the question what I would do when failures break me.  It is the question which made me realise how happy I was with failures. 



Comments

  1. Allwyn ThanarajAugust 11, 2017 at 10:59 PM

    Very nicely written.. loved it.. failures are the stepping stone for success....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 12, 2017 at 4:40 AM

      Failures are the stepping stones to nirvana 😀 Or at least, what Lord Krishna called Nishkama Karma 😁😁😁

      Delete
  2. Pranju chakrapaniAugust 12, 2017 at 12:53 PM

    A motivational post! Even I considered myself invincible but have become wise enough to make friends with my failures. I am happy to roll wherever the downward slope is created. It feels weightless, I feel like a winner defying my weight, defying gravity or is it surrendering to it?

    Losing and occasonal winnings are something I consider as the inspirations for my blogs. Yes. That's how I treat it. Happily living my life through my blog. The outside world is just for the inspiration, one dives into it but for the moments when one needs the selfish need of words. Life is beautiful hence.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 13, 2017 at 12:29 PM

      Only someone as cranky as I am can identify the motivational aspect of this post :)

      The present tendency to gloss over everything with "positive thinking" is a menace, I feel. People don't think because of that. Keats was right when he said that our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts.

      Delete
  3. Renu VyasAugust 12, 2017 at 9:39 PM

    "Losers make people feel comfortable with themselves."

    That is so true..I can totally understand this :) A beautiful post Sir !

    ReplyDelete
  4. Rajeev MoothedathAugust 13, 2017 at 3:53 PM

    " One of the fundamental and irrevocable truths of life is that people love losers. Losers make people feel comfortable with themselves"- Interesting observation.... and a good post.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 13, 2017 at 4:29 PM

      I make a lot of people comfortable with themselves :)

      Delete

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