Fear of failure

There is one school of thought which says “Forget the past. Concentrate on your present which is going to shape up your future”. I slightly differ from this viewpoint. I will correct this statement by saying” Learn from your past, Correct your present which is going to determine your future. You can learn from not only your own mistakes but mistakes made by others and not repeat those mistakes in the present which may impact your future. History is replete with stories of what people have done in the past and what went wrong and what was the repercussion of those mistakes. Everybody is interested in knowing the success story. There is nothing wrong in it. But knowing the story of failures is equally important. Let me tell you that behind every successful man, there are many who have failed. Do we know who they are and why they failed. If we succeed in the very first attempt, we don’t learn anything. We learn only when we face obstacles, Hindrances, failures. There is no shame in admitting failures. There is not a single person who has not made any mistake in life. What is important here is that rather than being in comfort zone, we should try to do something different and if we fail, we should try and understand why we failed, what went wrong, analyse the failure, correct the mistakes and try once again rather than losing focus,interest and abandon it altogether for fear of failure. Many of the great scientific discoveries have been made in the past after repeated unsuccessful attempts. One should have perseverance, patience, self belief. There is a dangerous trend emerging among youth now a days. Trying to get instant success. They don’t want to put up hard work. They have no patience. If you sow the seed now, wait for the harvest. You can’t become famous, rich,successful overnight. There is no magic formula. If you want fame, success in any field say for example sports, music, dance etc, you will have to put up lots of hard work for many many years. Abhinav Bindra is a classic case . Nobody knew him before he got Gold medal for India in Olympics. He was a non entity to all of us. He practiced shooting at home for 10 hrs per day for years despite the fact that, he did not get any financial or logistic support from sports ministry. Success did not come to him overnight. He put up lot of hard work and did not lose focus despite hindrances, obstacles, setbacks in his journey towards Olympics Gold Medal. This was possible because he had set for himself a tangible goal and he was able to sustain his motivation level for so long despite all odds. If we get everything without any struggle, there is no fun, no excitement, no challenge in life. A pregnant woman has to wait for 9 months and then go through labour pain before delivering the baby. There is no shortcut to it. This is the law of nature.