The Beauty of Failure

Growing up, we always heard the idioms, phrases, and sayings that tell us how failures should mean to us. Failures, despite of the negativity the word brings and denotes, has some perks most of us fail (pun intended) to understand.

Many of the older people I met, among their favorite advice for the younger generation is that we do not repeat the mistakes of people of the past. Those mistakes were frowned upon, sure, but they serve as a way to tell us that doing a certain way can result in the failure in the first place. A post in Psychology Today has a very inspiring way to tell how to look at failure. It's not by changing the name, a failure is still a failure. Denying its concept will not help in any way, but embracing it as a part of your life (Rubin, 2010) and treating it as a platform for success (Barth, 2010).

I have been baking cheesecakes since ever. I will not deny that my first attempt of baking this expensive, delicate, and spoiled (as in manja) savory dessert was somehow disappointing. And being costly, my mother wouldn't want me to waste another sum of money spent on a spoilt (as in rosak) cake. Of course I would choose to listen, I mean just listen, but I knew if I took some risks and found what was wrong, I would figure out the correct way to make sure the next attempt would turn out good.

So, I took some amount of money, big enough to empty half of the space, and bought the ingredients for cheesecake. I tried to bake it again, this time with more careful 'obedience' on the baking instructions, the weight of each ingredient, and any other extraneous variable such as the heat of the oven and all. And you know what the turnout to be? It was awesome! I changed the flavor to orange and it tasted just like it is supposed to be. I think it can compete with Secret Recipe.

My point is, without wanting to accept failure, and without learning from it, success is very hard to come out to the surface. I can say, success is the son of failure.

Listen to this song (Bette Midler - The Rose), there is one part that says, the soul who is afraid to die, can never learn how to dance. Perfectly said.

References:

Barth, F. D. (2010). Turning Failure into Success. Retrieved on June 9 2010 from http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-couch/201005/turning-failure-success

Rubin, G. (2010). Enjoy the fun of failure. Retrieved on June 9 2010 from http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-happiness-project/201006/enjoy-the-fun-failure