Failure is Greater than Success  

The message of failure, on the contrary, is quite the reverse.
It tells you that you have not yet reached your destination
and you have to try again, and make far greater efforts than
before.

Bill Gates (b. 1955) the American business magnate who co-founded Microsoft, once said: “I failed in some subjects in exams, but my friend passed in all of them. Now he is an engineer in Microsoft and I am the owner of Microsoft.” Gates is now consistently ranked in the Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest people.

Why was there this difference between two men who were following the same career path? The reason is that initial success caused Gates’ friend to imagine that he had reached his ultimate destination. Therefore, his struggle ended at the point where he got a job and began to lead a ‘normal’ life.

Bill Gates’ failure, however, gave him the incentive to accomplish more and more in order to obtain what he had failed to achieve on the university campus. It was this attitude that made Bill Gates a winner and finally he emerged as a great name in business.

There are many such examples in history that tell us of those who faced failure in their initial years, but emerged as super-achievers in their later years.

In life, success and failure are relative. The message of success is: you have achieved what you wanted to achieve. This kind of thought paralyses the mind. It leads to intellectual stagnation. It tells you that the time for hard work is over and now you can take things easy. The message of failure, on the contrary, is quite the reverse. It tells you that you have not yet reached your destination and you have to try again, and make far greater efforts than before.