We ought not to develop negative attitude towards failure and disappointments, because as rightly said, there are many ways to be a winner, but there is only one way to be a loser and that is to fail and not look beyond the failure.
its obvious that most people in life fears the mention of being a failure. An experience i had in school along with my colleagues is one over the past years that has being fresh in my mind. a professor walked into the class and declared that 80 percent of people in the class will fail his course that semester and fear gripped everyone including me. The first response was utmost fear and school at that point became a game of victory or failure. every day i wondered in my mind what the professor wants and how i can beat the fear of failure. i recall vividly that i memorized eight(8) chapters of the handout that year without knowing the content of the material, i manage to scale through on the day of the test only to forget everything just three(3) days later i had feared and not managed to avoid the failure i has feared, but i had not really accomplished anything.
i misunderstand failure, i thought it was a percentage. sixty-nine and lower meant failure. seventy and above signified success. that thinking didn't help me. failure isn't a percentage or a test. it's not a single event. its a process. i was unprepared for for failure. when i graduated from the university with my bachelor's degree, i finished in the top 5 percent of my class. it didn't mean a thing. i had played the school game successfully, and i had absorbed a lot of information. but i wasn't at all prepared for what is ahead of me. i found that out in my first job. i did everything the people might expect of me and then some. to be honest i was as concerned about getting everyone to like me because i thought i was helping people find their needs. i was a usual practice in my place of work to reward the employee of the month. i was overwhelmed by the testimonies i was getting from my every day run around as my colleagues where always praising me and saying i deserve the award for at least six months. but to my surprise i didn't even win one. at first i was devastated that all my efforts was in vain. i didn't stop to render the help even as i was devastated. i later discussed with my senior colleague who told me never to lose faith, that i should see it as stepping stone to higher ground. i was amazed when a new position came up and everyone anonymously agreed that am the best one for the job. they agreed that i didn't stop even through the rejections and difficulties i faced. i realized that occasionally, people are training for success when they should be training for failure, failure is far more common than success; poverty is more prevalent than wealth; and disappointment more normal than arrival.