Failures

Failure is intensely interesting. What’s interesting about failure is how you handle it. There are stories of some of the most successful men in business, in science, technology and other disciplines who struggled through the most difficult hardships and agonizing failures, sometimes almost giving up hope, but they had the grit and the gumption to struggle onwards and not allow failure to discourage or debilitate them.

While you’re setting goals, do not be afraid of failure. Fear of failure is a far worse condition than failure itself, because it revokes possibilities. The worst thing that can happen if you risk failure is that you will fail. But the fact is, most of the world’s truly successful people fail many times over the course of a lifetime.

We all know the story of the cartoonist who ran a small film studio in Kansas City, USA. He was such an enthusiastic novice that he went broke. Penniless, he went to the West Coast and created a successful cartoon character. It was stolen from him. After two such failures, he tried again and created Mickey Mouse. Known throughout the world, he was Walt Disney.

We have to equip ourselves with a formidable spirit, undaunted by setbacks. Kipling said: “We have 40 million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.” “No excuses” is a great slogan and it deserves better than being displayed on the butts of blue jeans.

Success, as has been said time and time again, is not hard if you define it in a wholesome, realistic manner. Just don’t set goals for yourself that are absolutely impossible to achieve or goals that are not worth achieving. There was a young businessman who wanted so much — in fact was consumed — by the desire to become a member of an exclusive sports club. It seemed to be an all-consuming passion and he drove himself hard to achieve it. He got into the club all right — not through the business he had set up, but by marrying the daughter of a billionaire.

I remember way back in 1987 when we issued the first department order formalizing the de-monopolization and liberalization mandates of the Department of Transportation and Communications as far as the telecommunications industry of the Philippines was concerned. I made myself a schedule of the initiatives and tasks needed to be undertaken on a time-bound basis, a one-pager just for me, as well as, in my mind, the vision of what a Philippine de-monopolized and liberalized telecommunications environment will look like. It was only for my own personal use … it was my own personal guide.

We faced a lot of dirty tricks from a “dirty tricks department” meant to discourage our spirits, but there could be no turning back. Even a white paper emerged on my supposedly colorful private life, which landed in the hands of a lot of newspaper columnists. I remember having said at that time how I wished I had that kind of a colorful and exciting private life. That was mere bravado because I really resented the lies.

In any case, stories of science and technology are replete with some of the most amazing inventions and accomplishments by men and women who struggled to achieve what they had set out to undertake, undaunted by failures along the way.

Among the many people to whom we owe our thanks for the computer, paramount is Benjamin Franklin with his kite in the rainstorm. When the kite was lowered, he found the lightning had magnetized the key, demonstrating a relationship between electricity and magnetism. A few years later, Hans Oersted, a Dane, performed a classroom demonstration with a compass and a charged wire, which proved Franklin’s hypothesis.

Without these basic principles, we’d still be cranking handles on mechanical calculators.

Ever hear of Michael Faraday? The son of an English blacksmith, he is, in the minds of many, credited with the single greatest discovery of all time — the electrical generator. This was achieved, however, with a great deal of struggles and failures along the way. The device, built in 1831, alternated the north and south poles of a magnetic field to create electricity. At about the same period, an American I’m sure you’ve heard of, Joseph Henry, took a number of Faraday’s ideas and applied them to a switching device known as the “relay.”

Henry was appointed executive secretary of the Smithsonian, where he shared his ideas and inventions freely with others including Samuel Morse, who combined Henry’s technology with his own Morse code to perfect telegraphy.

Before I forget him, remember Guglielmo Marconi? He devised the first diode, a device that has an input wire and an output wire and in some way changes the electricity that flows through it. It was used to receive radio signals, which were sent and received over a long wire and which we now call an antenna.

And of course, one of the most interesting to those who have read about him is a gentleman by the name of Nikola Tesla, known as the “wild man of electronics.” Born on the stroke of midnight July 9 to 10, 1856, near Belgrade, Yugoslavia, he came to America with a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison, who hired him instantaneously. Tesla actually was the first to invent wireless radio, and in 1943, the US Supreme Court reversed an initial finding for Marconi on this point. He patented his switches, which determined whether a plus or a minus signal flowed through. His patents were precursors of the vacuum tube and the transistor. One of his most outstanding patents was the “apparatus for controlling mechanisms at a distance.” In his first formal demonstration at an exposition on electricity, Tesla floated a submarine in a tank, then blew up the submarine with a remote radio signal!

Tesla was an extremely colorful person. He knew he had conquered failure and lived on a grand scale. He loved the power of electricity and dreamed of a world filled with electric light. He was one of the most eligible bachelors in New York and hobnobbed with the most fashionable people, often giving grand parties for members of New York’s 400. This was towards the turn from the 19th to the 20th century. The guy, however, was afflicted with a lot of phobias and anxieties, nightmares, hallucinations, and weirdly, a violent aversion to women wearing long earrings.

That Tesla had conquered his failures, learned from them, and struggled onwards is certain.

I am sure all of you have your own stories of friends and relatives who have conquered failure and triumphed. And of geniuses who achieved heights unheard of before, but the real genius in them is being able to handle failures along the way.

It is good for all of us to remember that success is not a harbor but a voyage with its own perils to the spirit. The game of life, it seems, is to come up a winner, to be a success, or to achieve what we set out to do, especially in this political world of ours.

Yet there is always the danger of failing as a human being. The lesson that most of us on this voyage never learn, but can never quite forget, is that to win is sometimes to lose.

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Thanks for your e-mails sent to jtl@pldtdsl.net.