Define Your Defeat

As the president of the robotics club in my senior high school, I needed to prepare my school for a robotics competition. Everything was going on well for us until it wasn’t anymore. I realized I was the only person who wasn’t scared to change the program of the robot. All my other colleagues were so scared to alter the instructions even in the slightest way.

Unfortunately, the programming for the competition was so different from all that they were familiar with. Even worse, I wasn’t around during that competition because I was also in the science and maths quiz team and we had another competition at that time so my assistant led the robotics competition. I’m sure you can tell how the story ended.

When we went down, the whole school defined it as failure but my definition for that was different. I saw it as a chance to do better. Good thing was that I didn’t let the club stay down. I had to figure out a way to let them start “playing” with the programs to take out that form of fear and that changed the story for the next competition. Right from that moment, I realized failure wasn’t real. (It all depends on how we choose to define it)

In other words, you can choose what to define the downs you face in life. We all go through downs in life but it’s completely up to you to define if you going down is a failure or not. There are people that go down and stay there embracing whatever life throws at them at the bottom. You’d be surprised to know how the mind gets tuned to make them accept whatever they decide for themselves and just like magic, they eventually start to feel like the world is coming to an end.

On the other side of the wall, there are really successful people that went through so many downs in life and later defined them as their steppingstones or lessons that made them who they are. There are other successful people that also say the downs they faced are what guided them and directed their path to wherever they are today. Not once, not twice, but so many times, I’ve heard people talk about how they literally hit the rock bottom and decided to pick themselves up.

“Oh, hmm me I’m scared to start this thing, it has to work, it has to be excellent, what if it doesn’t work? What if we don’t get the desired results?” “For me, if it doesn’t work I’ll do it again, if it’s not excellent, I’ll change the meaning of excellence to fit what I’ve done. If I don’t get the desired results, I’ll do it till I get it”.

If you are living just to give up then what’s the point of living? In my world, we fall down thousand times, we get up thousand and one times and take selfies. There’s nothing like defining our downs as failures. No please!