3 Failures of My Life

What are the most important parts of our life? – Success and Failure.

(You May Ask Yourself)

Success gives us the feeling of satisfaction, victory, pride, happiness and many more things but what about failure, when we fail we feel sad and disappointed. I am great admirer to failure and you would know as I will go ahead with my speech.

My school life was like a dime of a dozen. I was in 10thstandard and had a fear of 1 subject, “Social Studies”. My mind could not connect the dots of History, Politics and Geography.The fear lead to failure in all 3 preliminary exams of 10thstandard. My family was worried on how would I clear board exams. My parents started to search different ways to get me through 10th standard and move ahead with life. after a real hard work, my parents introduced me to a teacher who will do some magic on me that all of my school teacher could not do.

New teacher was actually very clever as in the first impression he realized that I am not a student who will read through all the books and understand everything so he experimented another method of teaching me. He gave me question paper of last 5 years of board exams and told me to write only questions from question papers in 1 note book and keep half a page of space between all questions to write answers for each of them. I completed the same in 2 days and then went back to my teacher, then he said told me, I will only be teaching you on these questions in next two months as board exams were not too far away.

After doing all hardships for 2 months, the day arrived to battle between my mind and all those dots which I was not able to connect. There were bubbles in my stomach before reaching the exam center. The battle started and continued for 3 hours. The only thing that awaited all of us was a result day. My parents almost lost hope on me as they were thinking, my son could not do anything in last 8 months, what he would have done in 2 months. The result arrives and secured 65 marks byconnecting the dots. I cleared my 10th board exams with distinction. I saw a feeling of happiness in the eyes of my family members and specially on my teacher who believed in myself.

This was my 1st failure in life and I learned that I am one of those student that cannot grab everything on my mind. I require someone who can understand my mind and taught me in a certain manner whom we call “Mentor” in modern world.

Life moved on from that incident and I completed my further studies. After studying 12 years in school and 3 years in in College, I realized that I am only going to use 25% of it in actual life so what should I do survive in this world. Then the brilliant idea suggested by my very good friend, let’s go out Gujarat to explore how are other students surviving with little knowledge. And that’s when I landed in the Garden City – Namma Bengaluru to pursue MBA in Jain College.   

It was June 2011 when I started my journey of exploring the world through different eyes. Immediately I noticed, there are many difference in life of Gujarat and Karnataka, of course apart from language, from difference in culture to difference in life style, difference from cloths to difference in behavior. I joined college 15 days late due to documentation and induction program was already over. As I entered my classroom, I was able to see there are already groups who seemed to very much engaged in some activity. The teacher introduced me to the class and asked if any of the groups to include me as well. I was curious to see my fellow classmates to raise hand and tell that we are ready to include him but this was not the case. Nobody seemed to be interested and they all again started chatting with each other. I can only hear some of my classmates whispering “Hey, He is from small town of Gujarat, he does not seem to be knowing anything, he is not able to speak English, we will not include him”. I was very much disheartened and just sat in one of those empty benches. For two days, I had to sit on those benches. 

Hang on, I was not only one now, there were 7 of us who came from different parts on India, in whom none of the groups were interested. On 3rd day of our college, we decided let’s have our own group and we all will help each other in whichever way possible. As we were just deciding on group formation, here comes the instructions from very senior lecturer that there will be a presentation tomorrow and these are the topics for different groups. You would imagine what we all were going through, we do not know each other yet and we had to give presentation tomorrow. Somehow we prepared and gave presentation but as expected by all, we failed to deliver. Our professor gave us the feedback and we accepted our failure. We knew that we are not the best in the lot, but we also knew that we are not the worst in the lot. 

We kept on delivering presentations and went ahead improving ourselves by taking feedbacks. The group that formed from last bench students, went on to become the best in the college. Students who were not ready to include us in their groups, were dying to be included in our group.

This was my 2nd biggest failure and I learned a mentor can guide you on how to ride bicycle but if you want to be successful in life, you have to paddle your own cycle.

College life got over and professional life starts with HSBC. I joined HSBC as an Associate in June 2013. In last 7 years, I have seen many ups and downs of my career. I have had a taste of success and failure both. After spending 3 years in same position, I was promoted to Analyst as per HSBC policy but it was not satisfactory, because I was eyeing for Senior Analyst and that needed to be earned by cracking the interview process. I was eligible for that role, and gave interview for 2 times but could not succeed in any of those attempts. I could not understand what was going wrong.

The advert in career portal released and I applied again. I prepared for the interview with my previous experiences and gave an interview. Again I failed for 3rd time in a row. You may be thinking what a dump fellow, could not clear an interview 3 times for same position. Yes, even I was thinking the same about myself at that time. It was a real heartbreak for me. The interviewer was able to see disappointment on my face. The interviewer gave me feedback on what are my development areas and how can I perform better in my next attempt. He also gave me confidence that if I can work on few points, I can definitely crack the interview process. I started to work on my development areas. 

After few months again the advert came and applied for 4thtime. The difference between my previous attempts and this attempt was my confidence level. This time, I was much more confident as I worked on certain points and I was able to feel positive vibes inside me. I was agnostic for Results. Results announced after few days and this time my name was part the list. I was overjoyed with happiness and was thanking the interviewer for giving right feedback and giving me confidence. 

This was my 3rd biggest failure in my life and I was able to pass through the line by increase in confidence level and having positive feeling for the 4th attempt. I learned that I need to have positivity around me and that will give me confidence to move ahead with bigger challenges in life.

To summarize, it is not importance how many times you fail in something but it’s important what do you learn from failure and how you apply learning from failure. Each failure teaches us something, and it’s upon us what we are learning from the failure.

“Failures are part of life. If you don’t fail, you don’t learn. If you don’t learn, you will never change”