Thomas Alva Edison invented the electric bulb in 1879.
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the US.
J K Rowling wrote the best-selling book series.

Are we talking about successful people here? We are just talking about their success. What about the efforts behind the scene?

What if Edison left experiment on bulb at 9999th attempt?
What if Lincoln gave up in pursuing his dreams after failing in multiple areas?
What if Rowling never approached a publisher again after being rejected a lot of times?

Would they still be called successful?

If you just open the dictionary and look for the definition of fail, you will be taken aback. It says lack of success. Lack of light is darkness. Lack of success is failure. Aren’t successes and failures our definitions then?

We define success as the destination. Reaching the destination is success. Not reaching it is failure. You should be hurt. It should be accompanied by mourning and grieving. You should condemn it. Term the people who don’t succeed by that definition as failures. Who defined success? Can we not change the definition of success? Can we not associate failure with pleasure?

The biggest mistake we as a society does today is defining the efforts without end result as failure. We don’t appreciate the efforts at all. Success and failure are defined as binary codes of 1 and 0. We need to change this approach if we ever want to make any progress in life. We need to associate failure with pleasure because failure gives us valuable experience which we would have never got being successful.

What happens if you continue to define end result as success?

 
1.You will be afraid to try new things:

By succeeding in life, you have just escaped an event where you didn’t fail. But for how long will you escape? Every day you have to live in the fear that what if I fail tomorrow. You will limit yourself to only those ways where you know how to succeed. Don’t you want to explore life?

2.You will only be result focused:

Result is not in your control. You can only control your efforts. Trying to control anything which is not under our control always leads to unhappiness. Your life revolves only around results. Not reaching those puts you under immense stress which further deteriorates your health.

3.You will have more regrets in life:

Life of regrets is worse than life of efforts not yielding any result. The latter one teaches you why it did not work, the former one stops you living your life.

4.You will hardly have any learning:

The person who found whatsapp was rejected by facebook. If he was not rejected, we would have never had this economical messaging feature at all.

How to overcome the fear of failure?

You overcome the fear of failure by embracing it.

Fail today and see the difference. It will hurt in the beginning. You feel all the efforts going waste. But wait! Was it a waste? Didn’t it give you an experience? You know what methods don’t work.
 
The one who succeeded only knows one way. The way to success. If you tweak the way a little, he is confused. He goes back to the fear of failure.But the one who failed knows all the ways which don’t work. Tweaking the way won’t scare him. He will fail more valorously then. Or after all the failures he might just succeed.

The one who failed knows the exhaustive ways in which things don’t work. He is more knowledgeable.

The one who succeeded would have done by chance. His knowledge is limited to only one way of success. He doesn’t know the obvious ways in which one might fail.

So fail today. Embrace the feeling. Learn from the experience. And fail in a greater way tomorrow.

Failure does not define what you are as a person. It does not mean anything at all. Every event has an outcome. It just depicts the outcome.
Don’t make just one thing as your life.

Who is called a failure in life?

The one who has failed according to the dictionary definition and considered himself a failure. The one who ceased to be oneself because of the outcome.

What can you do to change the culture?

Reward yourself for the efforts and not for the result. Question yourself everyday –” Am I enjoying this?”

There is nothing called as failing and succeeding in fact. They are just words. If you assign a meaning to them they exist or else they don’t. It is all about the journey. The enjoyment in the journey is all what matters. Enjoy your life today because you don’t know when your last breath is going to be.

Happy failing!