Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Success or Failure



I was just thinking. Is it that you must always succeed at the end of an experiment? After 1000 failed experiments as Edison said that he learnt 1000 ways of not approaching a problem can we also not propose the same thing in our projects?
I agree that Industry will not let you do this as their money is at stake but what about academics? Isn't their role to educate rather than form competition between peers. If a person is coming up with something that says a thing cannot be done in a way he has done because it might lead to failure doesn't that count? Or more appropriately if a person fails in a project/experiment and documents it well can't that be counted a well written paper or thesis.

Can't that failure color also be green. Infact failure should also be directed towards success??
What say? Well this philosophy completes the fact "each failure is a stepping stone towards success". But can't failure itself become a success story? This point needs to be well thought upon.
Well relax this thought just spawned out of mere thinking process.

6 comments:

AmiDA said...

it very well can... nidhi had a book - a biography, i guess, of an advertising guru, who actually was an absolute failure at it and hence suggested - 'things that you must NOT do to ruin your advertisement' - and thats the book that brought him success and glory!
(i never read the book; which explains why i cant recall his name ;) )
but yes i believe it all depends on your prespective! if you decide to smile at failure and hit it hard on the face, you have succeed already!

Jigar said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jigar said...

It is true that all things those you learnt in failure (or during the way to failure), you will never learn in success (or during the way to success). It may happen that success comes because of your luck (not Necessarily because hardwork plays a big role in it).

Also I believe that once you fail, your chances to win next time gets higher than previous one. In short once you fail just believe that you little closer to success.

Whenever you get a chance just read gujarati book, 'Prerna nu jarnu'. I read long time back (in 1997-98), not entirly but very small portion of it. I felt like I meant to touch sky. But after sometimes I found myself on beautiful earth.. he he...

maulik13 said...

This is a big issue. We have such a horrible image for failure. Even though we know a lot about failure it is not easy to handle it. When I think of failure it seems like there are lots of things connected to failure. Starting from the early days when we start learning we start connecting factors related with failure. When failure comes we always doubt ourself or we go into such a negative trauma it is difficult to think positive and come out of failure right away. As Kanan had said on my blog that the roots of failure are from the childhood. I still remember being afraid of getting less mark because I was always afraid that elders would scold. Why there has been cases of students running away from home in HSC exams or the worst commit suicide. Honestly failure is not enough reason to take the matter very negatively.

Especially being in IIT might make this more difficult. Considering how many people reach to IIT campus out of hundreds of thousand students, you people might be under a pressure that's not normal. It will be so obvious to expect success stories from every IIT student since it is IIT's pride.

But I totally agree with you. Why dont we see failure from different perspectives in normal life? People are afraid that supporting failure will not lead to success and that is why failure is treated so badly.

Gandalf said...

Excellent observation and thoughts Kumar.

Dave said...

very weel said kumar. I like your observartion and comments.