A university professor started off his class by picking outof his back pocket a 20-pound note. And in this lecture hall of about 200 people he asked,
" How many of you would like this note?"
Naturally all two hundred hands went up. he said,
"Interesting!"
He then said,
"Before I let you have it, let me ask you this question.."
He took the note and folded it into half twice and then he said,
"How many of you want this note?"
Still 200 hands went up. Now he said,
"Let me try something else.."
He took the note and crumpled it, and he said,
"How many of you want this note now?"
Still 200 hands went up. Finally, he chucked on the note to the floor. He screwed it with his shoe and crumpled it even more and picked it back up now with dirt, and said
"How many still want this note?"
All 200 hands still went up he said,
"Today you've learnt an important lesson. No matter how much I crumpled that note, how much I scrunched it up , how many times it was trodden on, you still wanted it because it was still worth 20 pounds. In the same way that 20 pound note held its value, so do you. No matter how many times life will thread on you, life will crumple you, life will scrunch you and life will squeeze you, you will always keep your value that spark within us all of bliss, knowledge and eternity that exists, that spark will never be taken away."
- source https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-best-advice-for-teenagers-going-into-their-20s?page_id=1#!n=114
Our value is not created by the price of our clothes or our bank balance or the job title that we have. We should be building life and not just building our CV"s.
In the middle of 2009, he was the software engineer that no one wanted to hire. He had twelve years experience at Yahoo, but he was rejected by Facebook and then rejected by twitter. He'd been to a great university, he had a great CV, but he decided to team up with one of his alumni at Yahoo, and started to create an app and focus on the start up space.In five years time, he sold that app for 19 billion dollars to Facebook. Believe it or not that was Brian Acton, the co-founder of WhatsApp.
When he was rejected from Facebook he said,
"It was a great opportunity to connect with fantastic people . And looking forward to life next adventure."
When he was rejected by twitter he was denied by saying,
"Worked out . It was quite a long commute."
It's so intersting to see that someone rejected from 2 of the top internet companies, actually responded with humour and positivity.
This lady was diagnosed with clinical depression, her marriage had failed, and she was jobless with a dependent child. She was on a four hour delayed train journey, from Manchester to London then came up with the idea and she started to write this book about this wizard. And as she started writing, she then finished her manuscript, took it to twelve publishers and was rejected by all twelve. Believe it or not, that's J.K. Rowling.
This man watch his first company crumbled. He was a Harvard dropout and his first company's demo didn't even work. He went on to build Microsoft,
His name is Bill Gates.
Therefore failure is just a sign that we need to widen our scope, we need to be ready and build ourselves up to the next level. Actually what we ended up achieving is far greater than what we'd envisioned for ourselves. And this divine plan, this orchestration can't be happening without this intervention that occurs because if we had it our way, we'd just settle, we'd just accept what we thought was our goal, what we thought we were chasing. But actually I've noticed that when you don't get that later down the line you look back and you reflect and you realise that what you gained is so much greater.
Failures are only failures when we don't learn from them because when we learn from them they become lessons .The hindrances we had is that we only comment about people's failures when they succeed and that's why they become this taboo or we feel like their failures never happen.
We need to share this stories earlier, we need to bring out these stories and expriences on the journey so that people who are on the journey can actually follow in those footsteps. And that's why Steeve Jobs said,
"You can't connect the dots moving forward, you only can when you're looking backwards."
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/failures-recipe-success-samuel-vijayakumar