We All Fail, But Still We Must Take More Risks.

I then had one of the guys tell me that perhaps I feared failure. He reminded me that even sometimes, after the best research and analysis is done maybe for an investment, occasionally some of those end up failing as well.
To me, it is never the fear of failure because after all I have failed in this life before and know all about the feeling of failing. Truly saying, we never plan for failure at all. We all plan to win and win big. Choosing failure is akin to eating oneself.
Let me use the case of my good friend Donald Trump, virtual friend for that matter because we have never met in person. He was beaming with tones of confidence that he will win the US presidency. He worked himself up for a landslide win.
But as it is with life, he lost to his fierce opponent. He often identified himself as a winner and never a loser. I remember reading a book he wrote in the last century titled The Art of The Deal, and how he strongly praised himself as only playing the game of deals. And in the art of the dealings, he only played to win. Winning is simply his game.
And then He won the presidency after Obama’s term expiring. He is a winner after all. He took a sabbatical leave from the Trump Organization to concentrate on winning for the American nation. He only ‘won’ and could not stand the site of failure throughout his first term.
Then came the latest general election for this year 2020 where Trump was defending his seat for a second term against the Democrats candidate, Joe Biden. At some point, Trump remarked that should he be defeated by a loser (Joe Biden), he would certainly leave the USA.
Unfortunately, of him, he lost the race to his ‘loser’ Biden. He had lost at least this time round. I looked at his case and thought he will be understanding to know that we all fail at some point in this life and that that it is never the end of the game.
Then within the same day last week, I read about Kenya Power posting a hefty loss after over almost two decades. Before this, they had only posted profits. They had won and won time after time; probably they had not known failure for quite a long time.
Then it happened this time and all the chicken roosted because they not only sensed a loss, but actually incurred it. This was a failure that was fatal. They had to make noise. And I believe the Kenya Power story will make headlines and be a hot subject for debate in the days to come.
Why did I write about failure? I am not glorifying it by any means; I am simply trying to make us understand that it is okay to fail because it makes a part of learning in our lives. People often learn from failure. Entrepreneurship lessons are best learnt in failure. So, we should not live in denial that failure never exists.
I remember growing up at a time when I was made to believe that life ought to have been a success all through. I remember being told that the fellow students who didn’t make it to the top of the class wouldn’t amount to anything. That was a wrong narrative we were sold to believe.
Then I came to college and the same narrative carried precedence. We only worked hard to pass. Some used dubious means to pass because the failures were to be taboo in society. We thus put our very best foot into it right away and knew we had already succeeded in all life by simply succeeding in our academia.
Post school, I then realized by experience that failure isn’t as bad as it is thought to be. We fail so that we can learn from that failure. I guess we need to be taught to fail so that when it actually comes to us in our real life, we will be ready and prepared to handle it.
I have learnt in life and in business that failure comes so that we can become bolder to take greater risks. We don’t take bold risks by winning and always winning. We take greater risk after we fail. We just wonder what will happen after all because even if we tried and failed, we will still go on with life given the fact that we have already experienced failure before.
In other words, we could have tried it and become aware that it doesn’t work and hence known so for the sake of posterity and thus giving us more freedom to try something else. If we invested in this business and failed, we move to the next one.
If we tried this thing and didn’t work, we get the freedom to try another one. We love and fail so that we can learn to love a different person better once again. We fail to secure a job so that we can have the freedom to try our hand at something else. Probably so that we can use our skills to see what life has in store for us.
Failure is never fatal. It is never final.
End.
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