Have You Fallen?

Failure at something can sometimes be canvassed as an excuse to not try or aspire any longer. It is certainly tempting to do so. After all, “I have done my best," you may say to yourself and throw up your hands—but can that truly pass for your best performance? In any case, how can you judge your best effort from only one trial? Or two? Or three? How do you determine your best effort if you are not setting a new challenge for yourself?

See what life has taught me: if anything I've accomplished looks like my best, my next performance would most certainly make that a lie. I know from writing books. Every subsequent book I write sets a new record in finesse. The reason is, inherently, we are wired for improvement. That's the way God made us. Experience subconsciously comes to the fore in everything we do, and failure is certainly the best source of experience.

Marilyn vos Savant—author and columnist—once wrote, “Being defeated is only a temporary condition; giving up is what makes it permanent.” Then Joe Clark nails it completely: “Defeat is not bitter unless you swallow it.”

The most compelling reason to try again is the fact that you have failed—failure qualifies everyone for another attempt. The school system best exemplifies this truth. Failure is an integral part of success. If you are not ready to fail, you are not ready to succeed. The best part of failure is that it pulls out our wrong beliefs and assumptions about success, and helps us to understand things better. Most importantly, failure helps us to understand ourselves better.

You see, the moment we got dropped into this world from our mother’s womb, a lifelong battle for survival began—we learnt by heart to swim or sink; breakthrough or breakdown. There is no middle ground. We may sometimes bend, but can hardly afford to break.

In my book, Laughing Over Serious Matters, I observe that every newborn child arrives the world with a grim and contorted face, and lets out a shrill cry. I jokingly allude to the harsh realities of this realm as the main reason for this behaviour. But observe how quickly the face of the newborn child changes to a smile—and even a chuckle—as they adjust to the realities of their new world.

What this behaviour of babies teaches us is that we need the right mindset to confront the inevitable challenges of living in this realm. The Message Bible puts it this way in Proverbs 24:10, “If you fall to pieces in a crisis, there wasn’t much to you in the first place.” We may fall, but not fall to pieces!

Your greatest fear should not be that you might fail when you take action. Your greatest fear should be that you will fail if you don't take action.

Let me encourage you about the things you should fear—fear irrelevance; fear lack of confidence; fear unpreparedness for life emergencies; fear begging; fear poverty. These fears should propel you into action. Hear this: the worst nightmare is to live a long life in poverty. What for?

If we do not confront the things we dread, we cannot conquer them; they will hound us forever. And we cannot gain much height in life if we do not gain sufficient depth in perseverance and enterprise.

I repeat, there is only one way to conquer what you fear—confrontation. What you fear will haunt you with ever increasing ferocity, until you turn and confront it head on. Everyone ultimately confronts the thing they fear. We might as well do so now.

Have you observed that we win majority of our confrontations? Yes, we do! Probably 90% of the things we fear never happen. The amount of strength that we allow to lie fallow within us is unimaginable.

Have you fallen? The most urgent need of a person who has fallen is to look around and discover the number of helpers that God has positioned around them.

About 38 years ago I suffered a great fall when I failed an employment probation at Shell. I was a young and ambitious engineer then. The experience shattered my career dream, and almost completely devastated me. Because I never saw it coming, for more than a week I stayed at home and mourned. What saved my engineering career was getting up from my fallen state on the advice of a good friend, and blindly walking up to an international construction company to be hired. And I was hired at a time I thought I was an engineering reject! In 4 years I become the company's chief engineer, the first African in that role!

That move was to open the most profitable career advancement door in my life ever. Shell came back looking for me after 12 years!

Had I continued to stay on the floor bemoaning my failure, not only wilI I not be writing books about success, I will lose every right to write them.

Life has taught me that the most sensible response to a fall is to get up again. The Bible counsels, “A just man falls seven times, and rises up again”—Proverbs 24:16. That is why even a dazed boxer or wrestler staggers to his feet after taking a bad hit—they may be counted out if they remain there on the canvas.

Stumbling every now and then is inevitable when you are on the narrow and winding path to success. Indeed, it is the evidence that you are on course. A path without thorns probably leads nowhere—it is so well trodden by lazy people that the weeds have vanished from it altogether!

I like the way the Bible describes the roads that lead to Hell and Heaven. The road to Hell, it says, is smooth, straight, and wide. Many follow it because it is convenient to travel on. The road to Heaven, on the other hand, is narrow and crooked, and very few follow it because it is inconvenient to travel on. But see how vastly different their destinations are!

I say again, if the path you are on comes easy and convenient, it may be leading you nowhere.

This is not to say that success is a constant grappling with adversity and hard conditions. It is saying that when you are inwardly toughened, the road to success can feel like an expressway for you, however narrow and crooked it may be. You may never be able to change prevailing circumstances, but you can certainly change the outcomes through how you respond to them.

A hero is one who makes an impact in unusual circumstances. If you act successfully only when all conditions are right—in physics we call that normal temperature and pressure, NTP—what is extraordinary about that? Anyone can achieve that.

(Culled from Chris Ekpekurede's book Take That Action!)