“Success is Not Final, Failure is Not Fatal: It is the Courage to Continue that Counts”
— Winston Churchill
It often happens that we get discouraged by a simple failure or someone else’s success but guess what both of them are ephemeral and it is only the courage to keep going that continues. If your parents have always supported you even when you failed and did nothing but encouraged you to try hard, that trying hard is what defines you. Or, if your parents or friends were not supportive about a decision that you made on your own, and did nothing but discouraged you and tried to scare you of failure. Yet, you chose to stick to your decision and tried to prove them wrong – that sticking to your own decision and trying hard is what counts.
Imagine if William Shakespeare never thought of starting writing plays just because he was not a University Wit like Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson, then the literary world would have never had Hamlet or Macbeth. The University Wits tried their best to disgrace William Shakespeare but Shakespeare knew that he is the “rough wind” that is capable of shaking the “darling buds of May”.
It is easy to get affected by failure or discouragement and even easier to start questioning your capabilities after that. Failure is something that no one wants to face and something that is hated by all. It is the worst feeling ever as if the world is crashing down. It is these times when hope is nowhere near and everything seems fatal.
But as they say, your life is what you make of it. If you want to stay in your head of yours with all the negative thoughts and the recalling of failure and make your head a prison cell for yourself it is up to you. And, if you want to stop thinking about failure because you are not the only person who is facing this and certainly not the first person who felt negative about life, start working on what you want to achieve and make a success out of these thoughts, again, it is up to you.
As Henry Ford once said about failure – it is another opportunity to begin again. Yes, certainly, certain circumstances and situations in our life are unexpected and we were perhaps in no way responsible for them, but if we want we can change it. We can choose to decide what we want to do with our life. We can choose if we want to try to work hard for the life we want, the comfort we want, and the success we want. Or, we can choose to stay at home, not work for it, and still waiting for something to happen. And, we all know if we don’t work for something we won’t get it. If it’s easy, it’s not it.
So, when Winston Churchill wrote “success is not final…” – all he meant was to not get fixated on the thought of success or the stage where you achieved success because it is important to keep growing. We don’t stop watering the plants just because there is one flower in the plant, right! Similarly, we can’t just sit with the thought of victory just by one success. Certainly, everyone loves to win. But, it is essential to know that this is ephemeral. The place you are in today, someone else will be perhaps not tomorrow but soon.
We should have the courage to continue and not get obsessed with victory. We should have the courage to continue and not get fixated on the thought of failure.
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