By Simphiwe Ndlovu
Achieving success or anything in life requires an interactive process. You are probably asking yourselves what am I talking about? Well I am talking about trying, learning, failing, improving and trying again.
It might sound easy and simple to do, but a men’s pride stands in the way of the good, most of the time. In my high school experience, I have seen few boys that are hard workers, but they don’t move up the rank in terms of academic.
This is because they only accept `trying, failing, and trying again` without ever learning or improving because their pride is too big to accept failure. There is no successful man who never experienced failure, but you know what makes him different? That when he faced challenges of failure, he challenged them head on and never let his pride block way to success. When men fail, they should acknowledge the failure, learn from the failure, and find the will and the ability to try again.
Besides success or the business life, men in general are constantly in competition with each other. I guess it all goes back to the olden days of hunting, their competition was the prey. They needed to win in order to survive.
Today the competition is different, they pursue jobs, the status and lots of girlfriends or even side-chicks, how sad! Competition in men will always be there, for instance, when one guy failed to get the `hottest girl` in the neighbourhood and one of his friends did, then the winner laughs at the loser, the loser will be humiliated. Not only the loser will lose, but he would have probably revealed his vulnerable parts to attempt to win the hottest girl in the neighbourhood.
Men can’t accept defeat because they want what they want when they want it. This behaviour leads to men bottling up their feelings, depression or even emotional scarring. Pride is also a big factor for men, because they care more about what will other people say instead of what they really feel. At the end of the day those people will not be there to deal with all the emotion-roller coaster, men sometimes create unnecessary stress for themselves and this leads to a short temper, anger issues or abuse.
Accepting defeat is to give your enemy an advantage because you will be able to move on with life in a peaceful state of mind. When you don’t accept defeat, first to yourself, you lock it into your body and psyche. Reinforcing the denial behavior assures the next loss will be painful.
Men probably see failure as a bad thing, and they should see it as a lesson and improve on it. Think of yourself when you were a baby learning how to walk, how many times you would fall and hurt yourself? But at that time did you give up. No, I don’t think so because you all grown now.
The world describes success as “Never messing up but I truly believe success is never giving up.” You will never truly know yourself until you are tested. Failure tests our capability to learn, adapt, and move on. I have realized that it is impossible to live without failure.
