SI WEWE NACHAPA, NI HIO MAKOSA YAKO

SI WEWE NACHAPA, NI HIO MAKOSA YAKO

FAILURE
ARTICLE SPONSORED BY: SANDAVO PUBLISHERS

Failure, according to Merriam-Webster, is a lack of success.

A lot has been written and said about failure and this is what I have to jot down about it too. I am a product of a lot of failures and a subscriber to the anti-failure regime.

I have this disease by the name chronic ambition, and I am ambitious that after reading this article you will have another definition of school, home and work life. Ambition is a strong desire to do or achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work.

Life is sometimes like an onion, and you have to slice it one layer at a time which sometimes makes us tear up and cry. It is sometimes usually a painful journey which you do not know when it will end. Nevertheless, it is the same onions that make our meals palatable and lick our fingers at the end.

Things happen to us in life, we get slapped and beaten around and many are the time we take it personal and cry “WHY ME?” “WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME”? As a medical student, many are the times the formalin has made love to my eyes without my consent and made me tear up. But still that did not obstruct me from dissecting the cadavers in the anatomy lab. One bad chapter does not mean the whole story is bad.

Failure is never the end of everything. Failure is just another opportunity to begin again, more intelligently this other time around as Henry Ford put it. We forget that failure is an event, and not who we are. And if you fail, never give up because FAIL means ‘First Attempt In Learning’.

Success comes with failure. As Laozi, a famous philosopher and poet of ancient China, also known as Lao Tzu said,” Failure is the foundation of success, and the means by which it is achieved.” Success is going from failure to failure without enthusiasm. Failure is usually the success if we learn from it.

Fear of failure must never be the reason not to try something. Fear is what keeps of us most of us from our dreams. In the process of following your dreams, you are going to incur a lot of failures, disappointments, pain, side backs and defeat, but in the process of doing that you will discover some things about yourself that you do not know right now.

What will you realize? That you have greatness within you, that you are more powerful than you can ever imagine, that you are greater than your circumstances. We are always afraid of failure; what if things don’t work out? The fear of success too, what if things work out and I cannot handle them. All in all, man has to prepare and be ready for everything. Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.

Sit down now and write the reasons of why you deserve your dreams and why you won’t give up. Because if you know you are doing something, when failure, hard times, disappointment and rejection comes, your reasons are going to comfort you and pick you up once again. Your reasons will lift you up.

There are people in this world who have lived their dreams and achieved them. Why not us?

We never realize that failure should be our teacher and not our undertaker. Failure is delay and not defeat. It is a temporary detour not a dead end. Yes: failure is our teacher, because if we never fail we never learn and without learning we cannot change.

This is even evident in our Kenyan families in that when you have done some mischief and your mother is set to punishing you she will say , "si wewe nachapa, ni hayo makosa yako ndo nachapa.” Because our mothers know that we are not part of the mischief. And with that punishment be it even some scolding you learn that a certain vice is wrong and when you do or repeat it you going to get punished.
It is through failing that we come to understand and know our mistakes and view the whole issue in a better way.

As Sonya Carson, the mother to the famous pediatric neurosurgeon Dr Benjamin Carson kept on telling her son,” Bennie, you can do anything they can do-only you can do it better.” Ben Carson’s story as he puts it in his books, Think Big and Gifted Hands , is a real inspiring story of anyone who wants to give up because of fear of failure.

Dr Carson being among the many who passed through can of worms in his childhood overcame his challenges and has become an inspiration not only to me but to many across the globe.

An anonymous philosopher says: There are no failures- just experiences and your reactions to them; and the only real fail in life is failure to try. However, one thing to comprehend well is that failure is good as long as it doesn’t become a habit. Yes failures are a great learning tool but they must be kept to minimum.