Success and Failures

Life is a beautiful path, and to lead it the right way one has to plan, understand and execute, to achieve the objective or goal. While traversing the path of life one may encounter success and failures. How one handles both, ultimately decides the fate of achieving the goal.

Success can very easily be digested, and in fact most times has to be handled every carefully. The heady feeling of success may tend to invariably disturb the balance and divert the attention from the objective or path, there by loosing direction. It is therefore absolutely necessary that success should never be allowed go to ones head and ensure that the stability of the mind is controlled and proper balance maintained.

Failures on the other hand definitely puts obstruction to the planned path. This in fact makes one stop, which is good. This temporary pause should be used to contemplate, analyse the mistakes and take corrective action. There is a proverb “Failures are stepping Stones to success”. This can be amply understood by the story of King Bruce and the spider.

Robert Bruce the king of Scotland was constantly driven to war by the king of England. Robert Bruce with his small army of soldiers was no match to the large English army and was defeated almost 6 times. This led to almost total decimation of his army and had to seek refuge in a cave. As he was thinking about his defeats, he saw a spider weaving a web and at one point could not reach one side of the wall. It tried several times and ultimately managed to reach. This immediately made him to compare the spider’s failures to his defeats. He realized that the success of the spider’s attempts was that it did not give up hope and kept constantly trying. This Robert Bruce took it, as a lesson and started reuniting his scattered army. He fought bravely the English army, and forced them to retreat. Thus one should never give up on defeat and should keep trying.

Thus failures should never be allowed to take control over our self-belief. The success over failures can be achieved only when one is the master of his own beliefs.