Every winner begins as a loser.
Most of us dream of success and of reaching great heights. Our parents, ancestors and even mainstream media paints success as society norm, while failures often be seen in such negative light. After all, failure is the exact antonyms of success. Almost nobody in their right minds would want to fail. It is something that none of us is equipped to deal with, although it is an inevitable part of life. The problem lies in how most people feel unworthy after they don’t succeed.
But really, failure is not a step backward; it’s an excellent stepping stone to success. We never learn to move out of our comfort zone if we don’t overcome our fear of failure. Someone who survives failure has gained irreplaceable knowledge and the unstoppable perseverance born from overcoming hardship.
Personally, 2021 was the year of great failure for myself. So when Viola Mananta, Regina Widjaja and JJ Liu asked me to be a part of The Powder Room Talkshow, I pitched the idea of having a full-blown conversation about reaching the greater height of success, through the deepest pit of failure.
At some point in life, all of us have failed. It could be something as simple as not getting through a test or something as big as losing in a competition. It is very easy to give up when things don’t work out. But if everything was easy to achieve in life, we would fail to notice its importance. Failure doesn’t mean that we haven’t worked hard; it simply means that we need to take another approach to achieve what we want.
But not every failure leads to success. And what ultimately separates the winners from the losers, it turns out, is not persistence. Dashun Wang and his colleagues at Northwestern University came up with research that the people who eventually succeeded and the people who eventually failed tried basically the same number of times to achieve their goals.
It turns out that trying again and again only works if we learn from our previous failures.
The idea is to work smart, not hard. “You have to figure out what worked and what didn’t, and then focus on what needs to be improved instead of thrashing around and changing everything,” says JJ Liu in our Powder Room Talk. “The people who failed didn’t necessarily work less than those who succeeded. They could actually have worked more; it’s just that they made more unnecessary changes,” said Regina Widjaja.
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