How to deal with FAILURE !

Depression, disappointment, fear of failure, worry, tension, nervousness, anxiety....all these negative emotions are results of a simple fact that we always want our life to go according to our plans, decisions and simply rate our success or failure based on whether we could do what we planned or not.

If you study yourself or the people around you, you will realize this. Somebody would be sad because they lost money (which they did not expect), some others would be dejected in life because they could not marry their loved ones (again against their expectations), some would be disappointed because their boss took away the credit deserved by these poor souls (they expected the credit and recognition), they went unnoticed (when they tried hard to impress somebody), their plans got delayed (career, marriage, childbirth - which they expected to happen in certain time frame) or take any instance of disappointment, the underlying point is THEY EXPECTED SOMETHING WHICH DID NOT HAPPEN; and they hence came to the conclusion that they failed in something or they were incapable. So the basic definition of success and happiness have been completely misunderstood

SOLUTION: Just ask yourself, if something didn't happen accordingly, what is the worst that can happen ?

• Money: If you lost money or incurred huge losses, what will happen ? Your lifestyle will be affected a bit, but whats the worst to happen ? You will come to streets. Nothing more can happen due to lack of money. If you come to streets, then what ? You will have to start everything from scratch, can't you ? You can, because you are not 75 yrs old, you have an entire life ahead of you and you can build your life again with whatever knowledge, talent you have. May be if you invest 5-10 more years, you will again settle in the life and can spend some 30-40 more years after that. Can't you do that? This is a worst case scenario which usually wouldn't happen. If there is a solution even for the worst case, why are you so petrified of petty losses. Loss of hundreds, thousands or even millions is not a big deal, if you are made of will of steel. Read: How important is Money ?
• Relationships: Do whatever you can to save a relationship, but if it is not working whats the worst to happen? You will lose the relationship, rapport, love and affection. That's bad but will our life end with that ? Definitely not. The pain will linger for maybe days, months or years in some cases. But life is much longer, unpredictable. Even if you take 5 years to heal from a bad relationship, that's perfectly OK. You will have 50 more years during which you will find people who will love you or care for you better than those you lost. Read: How to cope up with bad relationships
• Humiliation: If you lose respect or importance or get humiliated before the whole world, then what ? Do you think the world around you is obsessed about you to keep thinking about you and how insulted you were ? They would remember your humiliation only when they see you the next time and tend to forget after you meet them 3-4 times. Even if they changed their opinion on you. SO WHAT ? In the lifetime to come, you will meet many more people, situations, circumstances where you would be appreciated and loved too. MOVE ON. Read: How not to care others' opinion on us !
• Career: Do your best to succeed in your education and career. But what if you couldn't make it big. The world is so big and enterprising that people of every background and success levels have ample scope to live happily. Happiness is not directly proportional to educational qualifications, kind of job you are doing. The richest, most powerful, most educated people have their own set of insecurities, problems to deal with which you are not aware of. Read: How to make an entrepreneurial career !
• Marriage: Most of the cases, the people subject to late marriages or childbirths are more worried about social pressure than about the reason itself. Do you know anybody in your vicinity who didn't get married for life (unless planned for celibacy or bachelorhood) ? NOBODY. Everybody will definitely get married and make babies whatsoever at some point of time. Sometimes it gets delayed by days, months or years but IT WILL HAPPEN with very few exceptions. Even if you fall under those exceptions, just come to terms with the reality and realize that the society will raise that topic once or twice, not every time you face them. You will have many more ways to compensate the issue, if any.
• Death: You may have to face trauma before death and the duration of trauma depends of the kind of death. BUT the duration will definitely not be a lifetime. The maximum can be a couple of years. When you are expected to live some 80 years at an average, why worry much about those inevitable 2 years especially when you don't know when will that occur. So when it happens, you will not have a choice but to face the situation, so don't even acknowledge this factor and as Facebook status messages say "learn like you will live forever and live like you will die tomorrow". 78 remaining years are fun-filled.
• Others: Now if you are ready for worst case scenarios in terms of money, love, career, marriage, kids, respect and even death. is there anything else that can worry you ??? :)

Just take a chill pill and live your life king (queen) size. Read: Rules to be Happy !

Now that we discussed about dealing with supposed "failures", lets have a sneak peak at the lsome success stories:

Do you think Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook aiming to become a billionaire ? Do you think Columbus discovered USA expecting it would be a superpower today ? Did Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mandela, Anna Hazare etc start their agitations expecting nationwide support ? You can take thousand more examples of inventions, discoveries, corporate powerhouses, success stories; most of them were unexpected "MERE ACCIDENTS". So success is very overrated. Overconfidence, arrogance, conceit are bad byproducts of overrating the concept of success.

Thomas Edison had to face hundreds of failures before he could invent a working model of electric bulb. When asked if he is disappointed with so many failures, he said, each time he failed, he understood the way to avoid in his next attempt. In this way he avoided 99 wrong ways to reach the right way by implementing rule of omissions. So realize failures are very important for us to know what not to do, keep us grounded, make us tougher. But failure is often underrated. Depression, disappointment, nervousness are bad byproducts of underrating and overemphasizing failure.

In this context, I would use a quote shared by one of my cousins:

"Do you remember the things you were worried about an year ago? How did they work out? Didn't you waste a lot of fruitless energy on account of most of them? Didn't most of them turn out all right after all?

No matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be a better tomorrow. Don’t be too long crying over anything. Things you’re crying about right now maybe things you’ll be grateful for late...:)"

Bottom line: Success is overrated; failure is underrated and overemphasized. So after every failure ask yourself  "so, whats the worst that can happen ? don't I have age enough to start everything again ? can't I deal with that ?"