My mom used to tell me - Son, there are No Free Lunches in this World. While I am fairly certain that she wasn't the first to say it but it is her voice that rings in my ears even to this date. Life and our circumstances, both good and bad are nothing but unanswered questions. While I do not know anyone who did not look at their parents when they were a child and said - why do they get to have all the fun? Why on earth do we have to prepare for these godforsaken exams while they get to chill out in the evenings? Think.
Little did we know that exams are going to be the easiest hurdle of our lives. After all, boundaries were drawn around the knowledge we had to acquire in order to do decently in these exams in the form of, a syllabus. We were playing a game that was already rigged in our favour. We had an idea about the questions that would be thrown at us and all we had to do was comply. Then, Success was a function of our Efficiency over Our Compliance. I.e. If we could figure out a way to be more efficient within the preset boundaries, we could beat the average folks around us 6 days a week and twice on Sunday. Especially, if they're lazy bums. The tables turned the day we were thrown into a world where the boundaries are being blurred every day and the concept of syllabi became non existent. It finally dawned on us that we were not being prepared for this carnage while we were sulking at our parents and teachers for them trying so darn hard to keep our bubble from bursting.
Growing up in India I never understood the importance of failure because we like to keep our failures to ourselves and just brag about our successes. Failing in something is almost a taboo here in our society. Now, you might argue that recently we are seeing a lot of hoopla around celebration of failures on various social media platforms (often perceived as a late & a poor emulation of the Silicon Valley culture). But, if we were to deconstruct the failure stories, I think we will always find it to be an exaggerated version of failure stories which in the hindsight somehow led to the confluence of stars to create a stellar story of success.
There is nothing to be ashamed about a failure or making a course correction irrespective of the stage of life you're in. Frankly, the art of dividing life's stages by age are merely an extrapolation of a sufficiently (debatable) large sample. However, It's almost impossible to accurately call out the stage of life you're in. Because, even if you've been genetically chosen to live a long healthy life, a drunk driver on the road may have other plans in store for you. While we keep saying, what has happened in the past is not an appropriate reflection of what the future might have in store for us, but hey, we will always make the same mistake over and over again.
Human nature hasn't changed in the last 5,000 years and that's an opportunity right there! Perseverance and The Ability to Endure are the 2 most important attributes that will be the deciding vote on whether we have what it takes to turn our incremental failures into one grand success story.
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