Managing Failures in Life

Failures, Disappointments, Sufferings - they are all one and the same thing and they are all parts and parcels of life’s experiences.

Someone in the past had said, “We are born to suffer and that is why we cried when we first met earth’s atmosphere from the comfort of our mothers’ stomachs.”

Another wise man had said, “A young bird learns to fly by experiencing the sufferings and the dangers of a free fall to death. Instinctively he spreads out his wings to fly.”

Yes, sooner or later we have to learn how we can manage our failures, our disappointments, and our sufferings, alone.

For me, my disappointments during my earlier formative years have been expressed in my LinkedIn article

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/disappointments-francis-lai/

I did have more disappointments and failures all through my working life. Let me relate briefly some of the more noteworthy ones.

(1) Air Cadet rejected. I was an air cadet in secondary school and I learned a lot about how airplanes fly and the dynamics of air travel. One of my dream jobs then was to be an aircraft engineer. Imagine my disappointment when I failed to pass the interview for an aircraft engineer apprenticeship program with Singapore Airlines when I applied for that position, having known that I had answered all the questions very well. What was worse was the fact that my roommate of the time whom I had shared with him all my air cadet experiences and lessons managed to get that position.

(2) London’s life. I was selected to be trained in London on a Colombo Plan scholarship to become a Chartered Surveyor. I was in my early twenties then, married and had my first child there. The three of us were living in a self-contained single room in London. The scholarship paid for my education at the College of Estate Management in South Kensington and for my boarding fee, and that was it. Just imagine the sufferings the three of us went through at that time in the early 1960’s.

I held on to two part-time jobs (a waiter’s job at a John Lyons outlet in the evenings and a weekend job as a house-help for an elderly couple) while still studying for the professional examinations of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. At times we had not enough coins even for the electric heater in the room, let alone the food on the table.

(3) Unfair Competition. The rivalry of competitors in the same type of consultancy practices provided another set of difficulties that I needed to overcome during my working life. The key question to be answered then was whether to suffer in silence from unfair or unethical practices or to join the ruthless to exploit the market. I chose the earlier option and as a result, my practice was never the one making great inroads to fame and fortune.

Later I learn from the real estate circles to take “failures and rejections” as essential steps on the success ladder. “A ‘No’ is just another step closer to a ‘Yes’, I was taught by real estate gurus.

How are we to manage our failures then?

For me, I just have a three-step approach.

Firstly, I learned to keep failures and disappointments separate from my own identity and I said to myself, “Failures are the essentials of learning.” So I began to analyze every failure and to learn from it. I reminded myself that “pure gold” had to pass through many levels of heat testing to get those impurities out.

Secondly, I learned not to fear failures, not to care about what others or society think of me. Why and how I failed were simply matters between me and God and not the subject of any gossip or tweet. I learned to put aside all negatives and think only about the positives in any given situation. I learned to put failures aside and to move on positively into my future. Yes, I stopped dwelling on such negative thoughts.

Thirdly and lastly, I read widely during those ‘down-times’ on how others overcome their difficulties. I read the lives of Charles and Lettie Cowan for instance and was moved by the pages in “Streams in the Desert”. I read about Stephen Hawking, Helen Keller, Sudha Chandran and even Ludwig van Beethoven, the famous composer who lost his hearing powers from as young an age as 26. I listened to songs by Stevie Wonder and was lifted up by such enrichment. I even went to the extent of closing up my eyes and tried walking up the stairs as if I was blind and listened to the sounds of my own footsteps.