“Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life,” said the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, “Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”
I wonder what Steve Jobs considered “truly important,” since he was already worth over 100 million dollars when he was only 25 years old. He was also once one of Forbes’ youngest, richest men who had done it themselves without inherited wealth. Nevertheless, he had experienced failure early in life – something that I am sure, many of us have already gone through as well.
When I think about my own failures, I am encouraged to reflect on how to use the lessons from those failures to turn things around and succeed eventually. Here are some examples: I failed to learn a musical instrument at a young age. I failed to become a chess grandmaster even after a promising career in local chess tournaments. I failed to become an operations manager in the BPO industry within only a few years. I am already failing to complete my 2015 reading list, and I am failing to finish my comparative study for my first subject in graduate school.
The thought of possibly failing to receive my master’s degree in the next two years already scares me.
And then I remember the words of the apostle Paul in Romans 5:3-4:
Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.
Suffering leads to endurance, or perseverance, or grit. Grit is courage and resolve, a strength of character. I view sufferings and failures as an opportunity for God to move in the midst of difficulties. They are the perfect moments for God to manifest His glory.
There were times when I or a family member was sick and because I failed to save enough money for hospitalization and other medical expenses, I could only pray for God’s healing and He had always healed us. He never once neglected us.
Or that time when I failed to prepare new lessons for my first grade class but the following day, classes were suspended due to heavy rains. God never failed to get involved even in the minutest details of my life.
There were even countless times when I would fail to exercise self-control and self-discipline by mindlessly, frequently eating unhealthy food. I suffered from obesity and thought that God wouldn’t probably be interested in my eating disorder but still I prayed that he would deliver me from the curse of stress eating, and He did in fact help me succeed to lose a lot of weight and start a healthy lifestyle.
Yes, as I write this, I am trying to comfort myself in the thought that even as I count all my failures against me and beat myself up for not doing any better, God sees something else in me. Lord, I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. (Psalm 139:14)
Today, I want to embrace failure and adopt a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset. Computer scientist and Pixar president Edwin Catmull writes:
We need to think about failure differently. I’m not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth. But the way most people interpret this assertion is that mistakes are a necessary evil. Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality). And yet, even as I say that embracing failure is an important part of learning, I also acknowledge that acknowledging this truth is not enough. That’s because failure is painful, and our feelings about this pain tend to screw up our understanding of its worth. To disentangle the good and the bad parts of failure, we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.
At the end of the day, God’s presence tells me that I will be just fine. Really, I believe everything will work out just fine. Like what Steve Jobs said, it is helpful to remember that sooner or later we will die. So, even if I fail to finish that master’s degree or fail to make my first million pesos before the age of 35, God can still use me – so that others might learn from my mistakes – and God can get all the glory.
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