The Thing About Failure.

Books, games, movies, series, these things lie to us, the create this internal world of “if I do something well this time, if I train really hard this time, then I shall be the best!”. And it is by far the biggest lie children grow up with, and it has ruined the way adults look at the world more than most.

The thing about failure is that you have to do it, you have to fail, we look at history and success stories as these great singular achievements. When in reality they were anything but that, they were a series of spectacular, small, larger, insignificant, failures. You have to fail, to know what not to do, you have to fail.

The best way to explain this is through looking at exams, all the way back at school level. If you walk into an exam and you did nothing but still barely pass that feels good. But you learned nothing from this experience, all you learned was you could do nothing and still pass.

But, if you start to study, and you get maybe 1% more on that exam, barely passing, you will feel like a failure. Like even at your best you are barely good enough to make it through the exam. But the reality is that you need to continue, you must study again, study more, find new ways to study.

And again you will probably fail, you may fail to achieve distinguishing results for an entire year, two, three, maybe even four. You will however fail less each time. Now this sounds insane but a 1% improvement on each exam is still an improvement, and this is the thing about failing.

Each time you fail, you fail a little bit less. Until you get to a point where you are a mild success, successful enough that people start saying you were lucky. Then you continue to improve, all those things people don’t see, all those times you sit back and work on something without anyone there. These are the things that start to propel you through life.

Eventually you reach a point where people start knowing you worked hard, or even think you are a gifted person, someone who just has it all. When in reality you worked yourself to the bone to get there, and no one really knows this, apart from you.

Now, in the adult world the exam experience falls apart, we never take one big exam, twice a year, to see how we are doing. No, instead we go through life changes, small daily tests, or even big moments of testing your inner worth. These are the things you never see happen to those we read, learn, watch.

Like if you read about Bill Gates and how he started Microsoft, it’s always “Well he dropped out of college, started in a small apartment.” You know what, they never tell you about how he had actually worked with the earliest computers back then, failing, learning, and even made mistakes.

The same goes for the creation of Apple. None of these great computer systems were first time miracles. They were the culmination of small failures, things they saw others accomplish, and then ultimately knowing how to take the right elements to create the first home computers.

This is what we seem to have to struggle with lately, if we fail at life, if we stumble, fall, make mistakes, those around us sneer. Now, obviously, my own experience is nothing close to this, I have a deeply supportive family, and friends that understand what I am going through.

But I have noticed that those who offer work and the general opinion from those who do not know me, is that I failed. That is, it, because I am now a jobless adult, I have failed and there is no way for me to improve my life. That is the beginning and end of the conversation, and I think I may have figured out why this is.

It is because of, well, the media. The media says that you work hard enough, and you are a success. You never fail if you make all the right decisions, and the right decisions are always black and white, easy to know. Furthermore, when you read a book or history it is always amazing how the person you are reading about never seems to fumble.

This has created a dangerous environment, you become unemployable because you are unemployed, which is a vicious mockery of those who are trying. You feel ashamed of the fact that you cannot do what other are doing simply because you have no money.

Then when you are given a chance, it is from those who sneer or think that you should just accept the lowest hanging fruit. Which again, causes you to fail, as you simply cannot accept certain things, there is failing by mistake, and then there is failing because you repeated a mistake.

I, for example, know that no matter how long or hard I work in a company the most I can get as an increase is R500, and that was after 2 years of working at a company. So, if I simply accept the lowest hanging fruit then I will be repeating the same cycle, repeating a mistake that I have made 3 times now.

But then we need to focus as well on how adults live in general, we need to consider the fact that adults make more mistakes than any other living thing. We are more prone to make a mistake that we know is a mistake than anyone or anything. Think of the amount of times you have seen a friend get blinding drunk, only to regret it the next day, yet a few weeks later they would do the same.

Honestly, I have been completely drunk three times in my life, and after the third I was pretty damn sure I never want to feel like that again. Yet, I know people who are completely normal, have no addiction, that insist on getting drunk once or twice every few months. Simply because they think of it as fun, somehow going through the same failure on a repetitive cycle.

But again, that may not have been the best analogy, what I would rather use to analyse this is the humble loo roll. This is something I am completely surprised by, even grown adults that have spreadsheets of their overall costs never seem to realize this mistake.

Every office space I have been in has 1-ply toilet paper, you know the type, it dissolves in the air if it is too humid in a room. This always causes those who use the toilet paper to use way too much of it, in fact most people using the bathroom would almost empty the loo roll each time.

But it’s fine, I hear you say, it’s half the price of two-ply! But, dear reader, a roll of two-ply lasts three times as long. A simple failure of arithmetic, buy the two-ply and you’ll have loo for the entire month, buy the 1-ply and you’ll be buying loo-roll three to four times a month.

Now, I also need to mention that my train of thought has been interrupted, several times, but the thing about failure is that it needs to happen. Those who do not fail are never growing, instead I would say they are stuck where they are, unchanging, unlearning.

The thing about failing is, that it is a necessity, a must, you have to fail. The thing about failure is that it should not become a habit, it should not be where you stop moving, and most importantly, you should not view failure, as defeat.