What do you do when you fail? You give up or you try again?

The answer to this question determines how successful in life you are. Giving up easily is the gravest weakness to afflict human beings. Resilience in the face of difficulty is really important to survive and emerge as a winner in this race called life. It is, so very important, to learn from one’s experiences and imbibe those lessons in the future instead of just giving up. A social experiment by Surf Excel as a part of their marketing campaign, “HaarKoHarao” explored this rather important issue of failure and the importance of not giving up. The experiment was called “The Falling Test”.

This experiment involved a couple of kids and adults who were asked to cross a 20 feet long log of wood without falling down. About 84% of the adults and 92% of kids fell off the log. At the end of the experiment, 100% children successfully crossed the wood log while all the adults didn’t achieve this feat.

The difference lied in their approach once they fell off. While adults gave up after falling, kids persevered and even helped each other in crossing the log. This simple little task focuses on a huge chasm of thinking between kids and adults. It leads us to a pertinent question – Who teaches kids to be afraid of failure? Whether it is studies or sports, the ultimate aim is always to excel. If you don’t succeed or god forbid, fail, you are branded as incompetent.  Failure is seldom seen as a learning experience in the worldview of adults. But kids, as young and impressionable they are, try their best to overcome hurdles and complete the one task they are supposed to finish. Kids don’t know how to fail, it is we, adults, who teach them to be scared of failure through our admonition of an unsuccessful attempt.

Failure should not scare you, it should teach you. It’s high time we embrace failures in life and take on new adventures without fretting over all the times we can fall. This is how new ideas, better people and a learning environment can blossom. After all, is there anything to learn at all, if we don’t fall?

With board exams about to start, this lesson becomes all the more important.  To all those appearing for the exams, always remember,

Failure is not the opposite of success.

It is the part of success.

All the best kids!

Comments