Why do we fail?

What type of feelings effervesced when this question first flashed on your screen? Did it not take you to a different world, a secret world where you live with your failures, your fears, your weaknesses, your sorrow, your grief and where only a few closed ones are allowed to peep into?

Do not worry as I am not going to trespass into your territory because we all have our own separate one to deal with. No matter how successful we are now, we all have suffered failure, have lived through the grief, have silently cried in the night, and have felt like the feeblest known.

Have you ever noticed that how vividly we actually remember our grief, sorrow, failure of past life as if it happened just yesterday? Do you remember your joyous moments in the same magnitude?

Let us do a little exercise here. Just try to remember everything about any bad phase of your life that comes to your mind. 

Now, come out of it and go ahead and in the same way try to recall any happier moment of your life.

Did you notice the difference in the feeling?

Is it not that in addition to the vividness with which we remember our bad phase, we even feel the same pressure of emotions building up again as we remember? It feels as we are living through that phase once again.

Strangely we don’t feel the same while remembering our happier moments.

Maybe because those low moments remind us of what we could not achieve in life and still somewhere expect that it would have been different if we could..........

And on the other side we already have rejoiced our achievements and moved forward to achieve something much greater in life.

For e.g. can you still feel as joyous about your first job with income in 4 figures when you may be earning in 6 figures now?

And do you not still feel the same pain of losing your first love?

Nature also encourages us to remember our failures rather than our achievements. Why?

Because what we have already achieved is achieved and we have travelled the success path whereas what we have failed to achieved is a job undone and can again throw a challenge in future. Hence, it is nature’s demand that we should remember our failure in order to analyse, identify, workout and overcome our shortcomings and achieve what we could not and strife for complete happiness.

So come out of your secret world of failure and grief where you sulk and one by one, take each article out of the closet, sharpen it and shape it into unconquerable weapon of yours to find the way to zenith.  

Now after we are determined to find out the reasons for our failures till date we need to open the Pandora Box where lays all the reasons, why a fully equipped human being fails and in course identify our shortcomings. Here opens the Pandora Box:-

Lack of Motivation – A talent has no relevance if a person is not motivated to use it. Motivation can be either external or internal. The examples of external motivation can be social approval, family support, peer pressure, etc. and the examples of internal motivation can be the satisfaction of job well done, sense of achievement, to prove the world, etc. The external sources of motivation are short lived, while the internal source of motivation remains consistent and produce consistent performance. So more important is to search for internal source of motivation to keep going. For e.g. many students go for computer engineering because of family pressure and for easy and high paying jobs but later realize that coding is not their cup of tea.

Lack of perseverance and perseveration - Some of us give up too easily and some of us fail to realise and stop even when it is clear that the quest is fruitless. Key is to identify the point till which it should be tried before giving up. Foe e.g. there are numerous examples of students deciding against only after one attempt in some competitive exam and there are many who are just going on and on even after 3 -4 attempts.

Inability to translate thought into action – Some people are always engrossed in thinking and come up with bright ideas but somehow fail to translate them into action. Oh! I have done this so many times and still not been able to overcome this.

Lack of Maturity – Some of us are so impulsive that we don’t utilize our full intellect to analyse the whole situation and go impulsively with the first solution that pops up into our mind. This is when we go by our impulsive decision upon hiring or rejecting a candidate in first 5 – 10 minutes of interview.

Inability to identify the importance of end result – Some of us are so obsessed with the process that we fail to realize the importance and vision of the end result for which the process has been undertaken. This is quite prevalent in Govt sector undertaking where you can witness only processes but hardly any result.

Inability to look at the bigger picture – Sometime some of us are so deeply involved in the minute details that we fail to see the bigger picture as the whole. This is when we get into all sorts of technical details like graphics, hard disk, RAM, processor etc while buying a computer for home use or it is like deciding on the convenient mode of transport when we have to reach to a dying person.

Use of wrong resources – Sometimes wrong skills or ability applied is the reason for failure. For e.g. while selling a product to a dealer you are using your technical skill emphasizing on the technical specifications of the product rather than the benefits to the dealer then you should be sure to lose your business.

Fear of Failure – This is one the biggest and the over discussed reason for failure. I am not going to say anything different. There are two outcomes; you either don’t try or even if you try, you try with hesitation. In the earlier case, there is a sure shot failure and in the later case there is a major chance of failure. 


Fear of change/ uncertainty -  Most of us are afraid of change. Change that we all is the only constant thing in this world. We are afraid of what lies behind the change. We feel confident, secured and relaxed in our present situation but according to the law of change if you don't move ahead you are bound to deteriorate from your present position. 

Fear to initiate – There are people I have seen who would just incessantly delay to take off. They don’t gather up enough courage to initiate and get amidst action. This can be due to indecision or fear of commitment. They actually find this stage, just before you hit the ground, blissful or fall in love with their plan that they dread to see it fail.

Over confidence or under confidence – Over confidence makes you blind towards the obvious and under confidence gives too much importance to even a scrap. Once I was so overconfident of my preparation for an exam that I did not calculate the time to be spent on each section and in due course just managed to pass. And when you are under confident, you know how ridiculously you give attention to each scrap. One of my friend was so crazy that she used to spend time in washing and wearing the same dress for each and every semester exam which had no gap in between.


Wallowing on personal issues - There are people who are always wallowing about their personal or family problems for not being able to do things. They allow their personal problems to grossly effect their work. This is life and in due course you will get some immensely joyous moments and some really sorrowful incidents. You need to strike a balance. I know it is difficult but this is what is called professionalism and Sachin Tendulkar had provided with the best example  he returned  for the next cricket match immediately after the funeral of his father. 

Self Pity -  There are people who so highly underestimate themselves and their condition that most of the time they are feeling sorry about themselves instead of utilizing the energy and time to overcome their problems. They don't want to come out of that state and always look for people to feel sympathetic for their condition. 

Blame game - There are two types of people here. Some blame themselves for slightest of mishap and some always find someone to put the blame on. Blaming yourself for every little nick will make you under confident and blaming others will not spare you from the inevitable.

Trying to avoid the inevitable - There are moments in life where we know or we have to take certain problems for granted and work around them to achieve the target but no, we unnecessarily try to dodge the inevitable and get beaten as we are not prepared to tackle it.

Rejoicing on small achievements - I had once read a quote "Don't waste time rejoicing on past laurels, but strife for new ones." People celebrate and reward themselves for smaller achievements when the real achievement is still a distance. Kindly delay your gratification untill you actually succeed. That will give you much bigger rewards. 

Over Dependency -  Over dependency on certain entities, be it human, process, material can also lead to failure. We can't depend on others to do all the things when we should be the one doing it. Others would not justify with the commitment level when it comes to your task. Your proven success mantra would not work every time in each an every situation so over dependency on a certain process can be fatal.

Inability to complete tasks - There are people I have seen who just are not able to complete the task. They are hopelessly enmeshed with irrelevant details that the task never seems to draw to an end. Such people are  fearful of what to do next. There are others who just leave the task incomplete and jump to some other task as they loose interest and as things seem to approach an end and there is no challenge left either. 

Lack of concentration - I have seen some very intelligent people with a serious lack of concentration. They exhibit a very short spans of concentrations. They are interested or attentive to a certain thing for a very short period of time and something else catches their attention in between.

Lack of proper thought process - The type of thinking needed for a certain task is very important. Do we need to think too little or too much as I have already discussed in detail in one of my earlier post. We also need to decide whether a certain task needs analytical thinking or a creative thinking before setting on sail of thinking.

Procrastination -  There are certain people who just can't take off until they reach the delivery pressure. They just drag their feet or delay things unnecessarily until the final pressure situation arises. 

Lack of proper distribution of work - This also happens with people when they take up too many work at a time, they are unable to complete any and when they undertake too little they may get complacent or may even experience a reduced level of accomplishment.

Excessive dependency on our Luck - Luck is one of the factors of success or failure but people generally have been provided with a wrong definition of luck. Luck is not what we are wearing on our fingers or on our body. Luck is not the way we are sitting or what we had for breakfast. Luck is even not the special blessing of one of our favorite God. Luck is your presence at the right place and at the right time with all favorable conditions. According to this definition half of the luck is in our hand and half is coincidence, so what should we do? We should concentrate on the half that is in our hands and let the other half be handled by the one who is capable of. It only adds to our frustration and destruction of our faith towards the almighty when we excessively depend on our luck and superstition. 

My Pandora Box is empty and I am unable to think about any more reasons of failure. There may be many more which my short experience may not yet have the privilege to lay its eyes upon.   

To conclude I would only like to say that in order to overcome your failures, your shortcomings, your fears, your phobias; take it head on and challenge it even though you can hear your heartbeat as loud as it could be, because overcoming these demons is the greatest achievement in life and will give you the pleasure that nothing else can give. 

Enjoy The Fight with Yourself