Henry Ford once said, “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” I am sure each and every student would be familiar with the inspiring words of one of the world’s richest men, Bill Gates, who said “I failed in some subjects in exam, but my friend passed in all. Now he is an engineer in Microsoft and I am the owner of Microsoft.”
Every year, thousands of students across the nation fail in exams and have to clear their arrears (backlog). Some students manage to clear their arrears in time while studying in college itself, but for some, even after repeated attempts are unable to clear them on time.
Clearing arrears, especially for those who are no longer in college, is a very lonely journey as they would not be personally meeting many of their batchmates frequently, as most would be working at different locations or perhaps even different time zones and many still would be pursuing higher studies elsewhere.
Often for parents this loneliness is very difficult to understand and comparing the student with his batchmates and friends would only aggravate the emotional turmoil he or she goes through.
Their dampened enthusiasm often leads to frequent quarrels and moodswings, which affect the student’s productivity. In some cases this unwanted pressure has even led to suicides. To beat this parental pressure and loneliness, some students may even succumb to dangerous habits which are very difficult to quit in the long-run.
People need to understand that pressuring the student by comparison doesn’t work. Is it necessary that if your cousin goes to US, you too should follow?
In the exam hall too, the hapless student is tormented by his fear of not being able to perform well enough. Adding to the anxiety would be seemingly confident classmates who virtually seem to be stocking up on extra sheets, unable to contain their answers to a few pages.
But remember that each person is wired differently. All five fingers are not the same. Some are slow learners, but once they gain momentum and pick up speed, nothing can stop them from realising their dreams.
I recently heard an inspiring story in which a student had cleared more than 40 backlog engineering papers in one shot with continuous exams both in the morning and afternoon for days together. Arrears in papers are not a barrier to your career. In fact, tasting failure early in life in will make you much stronger than many who would experience failure for first time in their midlife, which may come as a rude shock.
In Silicon Valley, candidates who have faced failure are preferred over people who have only tasted success. You are likely to be offered a higher salary if your last venture was a failure than if it was a success. Failure means that somebody else has paid the ‘tuition fee’ for your learning experience, so you don’t have to be imparted the same lessons again. Let us understand that exams and grades are temporary and only education is permanent. In fact, life is the most difficult exam. In school we learn the lessons before the test, but life gives you the test and then the lesson. Many fail because they try to mimic others, all the while failing to realise that in life each person gets a different question paper. We should celebrate failure so that we can move on to the next big thing in life.
(tskarthik13@yahoo.com)