Success is the result of learning from failures

By Lionel Wijesiri

Bethany Meilani Hamilton, 24-year old American professional surfer always fascinated me. I regard her as an extraordinary woman who overcame her serious disability to live not just independently but a rich, fulfilling life. Today, her story has become a role model for anyone seeking true meaning to a positive approach in life. On October 31, 2003, at age 13, Bethany went for a morning surf along Tunnels Beach, Hawaii, with her best friend Alana Blanchard and Alana’s father and brother. Around 7:30 in the morning with numerous turtles in the area, she was lying on her surfboard with her left arm dangling in the water, when a 15-foot tiger shark attacked her, severing her left arm just below the shoulder. The Blanchards helped paddle her back to shore.

Then Alana’s father fashioned a tourniquet out of a surfboard leash and wrapped it around the stump of her arm, before she was rushed to Hospital. By the time she arrived there she had lost over 60 percent of her blood and was in hypovolemic shock. She underwent surgery and had to spend a week in recovery before being released.

Despite the trauma of the incident, Bethany was determined to return to surfing. Less than a month after the incident, she returned to her board. Initially, she adopted a custom-made board that was longer and slightly thicker than standard and had a handle for her right arm, making it easier to paddle, and she learned to kick more to make up for the loss of her left arm. After teaching herself to surf with one arm, on January 10, 2004, she entered a major competition. A little over a year later, she won her first national title. Between 2005 and 2009, she entered 10 major competitions and won four times between first and third places.

On March 20 this year, she won the Surf N Sea Pipeline Women’s Pro, a major event in women’s surfing held at the Banzai Pipeline, a surf reef in Hawaii. In 2004 she wrote about her experience in her autobiography Soul Surfer: Fighting to Get

Back on the Board. This was made into a feature film - Soul Surfer, which was released in 2011.There were two more documentaries made about her life. She has appeared on many television shows since the loss of her arm. Rejection Reading Bethany’s story, I often wonder how failure shatters most of us and how much we panic even though we have an inherent strength to overcome the fear.

Remember how we learnt walking and cycling? Falling several times while learning how to walk and peddle was common. But ironically from our childhood days we are made to believe that winners get the rewards and losers are jeered. Some of the world’s most successful people have failed - sometimes more than once.

Like Bethany, there are numerous examples of celebrities, sportspersons, actors, authors and leaders who in spite of facing defeat did not give up on their dreams. They succeeded in overcoming their fear of failure.

Steve Jobs was fired from his own company; Warren Buffet was rejected by Harvard University, Richard Branson is a high school drop-out, Abraham Lincoln lost eight elections and Thomas Edison, failed more than 1,000 times when trying to create the light bulb.

Oprah Winfrey was fired from her first television job as an anchor. Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas.”

Steven Spielberg was rejected by the University of Southern California School Of Cinematic Arts many times.

In Sri Lanka, nearly 30,000 government troops were injured during the last three years of our 30-year war with terrorists. Most of them are returning to the society to live in that same dignified manner. They play games. They are employed productively in different workplaces. For example, two progressive apparel factories are run entirely by ‘disabled’ soldiers. Their struggle to return to independent lifestyles proves that their hearts are mightier than ours. The disasters did not keep these great people away from achieving their goals and becoming extra-ordinarily successful.

Focus on failure

The sad part is, many of us avoid the prospect of failure. We are so focused on not failing that we do not aim for success, settling instead for a life of mediocrity. When we do take missteps, we gloss over them, selectively editing out the miscalculations or mistakes in our life’s résumé.

Of all the things we are wrong about, this idea of error might well top the list. We are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition.

New trend

Fortunately, in the business field, thinking has begun to change. In today’s cash-strapped-business environment, some employers are no longer shying away from failure - they’re embracing it. I have read a recent article in BusinessWeek, which says that many companies are deliberately seeking out those with track records reflecting both failure and success, believing that those who have been in the trenches, survived battle and come out on the other side have irreplaceable experience and perseverance. They’re veterans of failure.

The same holds true for personal quests, whether in overcoming some specific challenge or reaching your full potential in all aspects of life. To achieve your personal best, to reach unparalleled heights, to make the impossible possible, you can’t fear failure, you must think big, and you have to push yourself.

Worth the risk

When the rewards of success are great, embracing possible failure is key to taking on a variety of challenges, whether you’re reinventing yourself by starting a new business or allowing yourself to trust another person to build a deeper relationship.

The other day, I was reading the life-story of legendary aviator Amelia Earhart. She was an American aviation pioneer and author. Earhart was the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She received the U.S. Distinguished Flying Cross for this record.

She set many other records, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences and was instrumental in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, an organisation for female pilots. During an attempt to make a circumnavigation flight of the globe in 1937 in a Lockheed Model 10 Electra, Earhart disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean. Although her final flight proved fateful, her contemporaries believe she knew the risk - and decided that the potential reward was worth it. Earhart’s advice when it came to risk was simple and direct: ‘Decide whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying.”

Of course, the risks you take should be calculated; you shouldn’t fly blindly into the night and simply hope for the best. Achieving the goal or at least waging a heroic effort requires preparation, practice and some awareness of your skills and talents. Fear of failure You fail. I fail.

The best of us fail, and the rest of us fail, too. Those who never rise from a fall often see failure as final. What we all need to remember is that life is not a pass-fail test. It is a trial and error process. Those who succeed bounce back from their bonehead mistakes because they view their setbacks as temporary and as learning experiences. Winston Churchill captured the essence of it when he said, “success is the ability to go from one failure to another without no loss of enthusiasm”.