“You don’t make life decisions if you are reeling from a loss”

We often have the misconception to avoid discomfort, we somehow fail to realize that discomfort is our friend. Avoiding it would only mean that we are avoiding our own growth and missing out the thousands of opportunities that lies ahead.

Is it safe to say that the younger generation of today are not risk takers? Well yes, probably most of them. We are somehow brought up avoiding the feeling of discomfort, and it’s not a good thing.

With the current situation right now, people have lost their jobs, businesses are struggling and trying to make the ends meet. I have seen how these young people respond to these setbacks. Instead of using this as their drive to continue and grow, they have an impulse to make this as an excuse, give up, blame others, rant in their social media accounts and so on. Does this sound familiar to you?

You know what most success stories have in common? “They have a series of defeats”, and by “series”, it’s more than just one setback. Look where it lead them. They did not give up after the initial failure; Bethany Hamilton’s left arm was bitten completely off by a shark but that didn’t stop her from surfing, Jim Carrey spent years from one comedy club to another before he even got his first major break, Walt Disney was fired from his newspaper job because he “lacked imagination” and J.K Rowling’s first book “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” was rejected by a dozen of publishers. You see, these people have built success on failure. If they had given up after these setbacks, they will not be where they are right now.

I myself had a short stint in a patisserie in U.A.E, a year after my graduation. I gave up my home-based cake shop and decided to work there. I was young and eager to learn but it wasn’t what I pictured out, and it turned out I had to come back home with nothing. But hey, that was my greatest epiphany. I learned so many things that I still value up to now.

I am not saying I’ve reached my destination. What I’m trying to say is that there will always be failures along the way (more than successes) and when we fail, it’s either we get wounded, hurt, and become bitter about it or we get wiser. I always choose the latter. Use this failure as your strength and not as a weakness. And the next time you fail at something? Don’t just jump into conclusions or right on post your problems on your social media, or decide to give up because surely, you’ll regret these actions afterwards. As Jessica Pearson in the series “Suits” would say, “You don’t make major life decisions when you are reeling from a loss”.

Gerard Apurado

Pâtissier