Why I Failed , livre ebook

Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd. - Shweta Punj

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105 pages

English

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Fail! And we are stamped for life. Don't we try and run from failure all our lives? But, 'spontaneous doing has to go through failures.' Acknowledging failure is singularly the most difficult thing to do. It takes tremendous courage to come out and say, yes, I failed. Shweta Punj chronicles sixteen such leaders who have celebrated their failure as much as their success. Each story is an anatomy of failure. So whether it was the difference between 'need' and 'want' that led Abhinav Bindra to miss that winning shot, or whether it was a suicide attempt that pushed Sabyasachi Mukherjee into fully realizing his potential-these stories will prod you to look at failure differently.

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Economics

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Publié par	Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Date de parution	11 juillet 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184004533
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0420€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
Success and failure go hand in hand in the life of every person. The lessons one learns from failures provide the foundation to build a success story. In India, we fear failure and thereby success becomes a distant dream. We need to honour and celebrate ideas and people who fail, for they are the ones who are best prepared to script their successes. Shweta s book on learnings from failure is a marvelous effort and a must read for anyone who wants to achieve something big.
-Kishore Biyani, Founder and Group CEO, Future Group
In my professional life as an entrepreneur, I have had experiences of both success and failure. Without being disheartened, I had the courage of conviction to learn from failures to build further success. Shweta has provided a fairly good insight into lessons learnt from events of failure, which will certainly help readers immensely.
-Dr Vijay Mallya, Chairman, UB Group
In an era of sanitized books on successes, Shweta Punj has a very unusual take - how we can learn from our failures. These vignettes from 16 leaders will greatly benefit anyone who wants to go beyond uplifting stories, to really learning from those who have tried, failed and finally succeeded.
-Nandan Nilekani, Chairman, Unique Identification Authority of India and co-founder of Infosys Ltd
Success and failure are the two inextricably interwoven aspects of life. While success is celebrated, failure is forgotten and often despised. Shweta Punj has broken trodden tradition and has dealt with failure in an immaticulate style. While those who fail surely learn from their mistakes, the book gives an opportunity to all of us to benefit from the unhappy experiences of others. The book has been written in a racy style and makes an interesting and take away read.
-G.N. Bajpai, Former Chairman, Securities and Exchange Board of India

Published by Random House India in 2013
Copyright Shweta Punj 2013
Random House Publishers India Private Limited Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301, UP
Random House Group Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 2SA United Kingdom
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author s and publisher s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 9788184004533
To my grandparents, Surinder Mohan, Kaushalya Devi, and Bimla Mudgill-for their blessings and so much love
Contents
Introduction
Abhinav Bindra
Anu Aga
Madhur Bhandarkar
Narayanan Vaghul
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw
Gorur Ramaswamy Iyengar Gopinath (Captain Gopinath)
Sabyasachi Mukherjee
Narayana Murthy
Dr Prathap C. Reddy
Sunil Alagh
Subhash Ghai
Ajit Gulabchand
Sminu Jindal
William Bissell
Sanjiv Goenka
Shankar Sharma
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
Introduction
Failure, then, failure! So the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out!
-William James
I sn t the fear of failure a barrier that often holds us back from getting what we really want and becoming who we want to be? Why does failure feel so wrong? Unfair? Discouraging? Why does it hurt so much to fail? Why does failure seem like the end of the road? Failure can feel worse than death. Remember the Why didn t I just die? feeling? Certain failures can just kill us and many of them make us want to bite the dust.
It is no wonder then that there is so much written and said on how one could cope with failure. It is unappetizing, nauseating, and difficult to digest. It is also a cultural thing. In India, we look at failure with much disdain and discomfort. From the moment we step into the real world, so to speak, it is ingrained in us that we always have to succeed at everything. We cannot fail. History only applauds winners.
If we look at the chronological framework of India s history, it is about winners. The battles, the endowment of religious institutions, dates of inscriptions are there because people who were the winners , the powerful, believed those records were important to preserve. But as many historians have reiterated, all that we know of Indian history is not all that we could know. The historical records tell us more about the kings, the powerful, the winners.
It is surprising that the story of Sage Raikva (a homeless bullock cart driver) was quoted in the Upanishads-the text of the Brahmins. King Janusruti seeks the help of Raikva to win over his people. What is surprising here is not that Raikva helped the king win, but that he got a mention in the Upanishads which is largely about the Brahmin elite.
Usually failure is either impossible to remember or impossible to forget.
Sigmund Freud in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life recounts an experience: Once, while settling his monthly accounts, Freud came upon the name of a patient whose case history he couldn t recall, even though he could see that he had visited her every day for many weeks, just six months ago. He tried very hard to remember the patient, until the memory finally came back to him. The patient in question was a woman whose parents brought her in because she complained incessantly of stomach pains. Freud diagnosed her with hysteria. A few months later, she died of abdominal cancer.
Over the course of working on this book, when I would explain the topic to friends, family, or even senior executives of companies, most would respond by saying: Why failure? Why would you pick a topic like failure? And that s exactly the reaction I was expecting and hoping for. Failure, much like success, is not for everyone.
This book is built around stories of people who screwed up, sometimes again and again. These stories involve imagination, miscalculations, illusions, misadventures, ambition, love affairs, inspiration, and most importantly courage.
Each story is revelatory at several levels, exploring failures of varying degrees and varieties-messing up on the first big opportunity, failing in coping with bureaucracy and nepotism, failure of life s circumstances, failing to lead and making others follow your vision-every chapter offers an insight into failure of a different kind.
Most often, the experience of recognizing failure can be life-altering, shocking, funny, pleasurable, cathartic, illuminating, and confusing. The realization process usually puts us at odds with ourselves. In the aftermath of failure, we question ourselves, our abilities:
How could have I done that?
What was I even thinking?
Did I really do that?
But, just for a moment, if you put the hurt, injury, insults associated with failure aside-and evaluate your failure for what it is-the process can be far more defining than success. Whether we accept it or not, failure often helps us think clearly. It forces us to analyse and plan better.
There is an inherent tendency to reward winning and to shun failure. But even amid such hostility towards failure, there are those who consider failing a gift. That you need to fail to succeed is not really an oxymoron.
Writing this book has been a revelation for me. It forced me to rigorously explore my own feelings about failure. I am your quintessential Indian who wants success but without the pain of failing. The first time I failed in Math, it put me off a subject that had intrigued me. Numbers are fascinating, but it was the fear of failing again that took away that magic of really trying. And that s just one of the many times where I have stepped back for the fear of failure. The agony associated with failing can be overbearing enough to make you walk away.
Reprimanding failure begins very early on in life. From the hobbies we inculcate, to the subjects we choose, to the jobs we opt for-if we think about it-all are intrinsically linked to failure. I know someone who gave up playing the violin to fit in with his peer group. It is this need to fit in that undermines our ability to fail.
But then, even with our cultural conditioning, there are stories of those who have found recipes for success in their failures.
Indian businesses operate in one of the toughest environments in the world. Constant policy flip-flops, loose regulatory framework, and inadequate infrastructure are only some of the challenges; apart from that is the Indian mindset that places too much emphasis on stability and clarity of purpose very early on in life. A society that forces us to fit into boxes-so much so that there is no room to fail.
But then there are the outliers, the visionaries who cannot fit in, and that s how they have gone and built some of the largest corporations in the country which have defined, in more ways than one, India s economic trajectory.
The late Dhirubhai Ambani, founder of India s largest conglomerate, Reliance Industries, built the company at a time when capital costs were so high that most companies would be made unprofitable or failed. But Dhirubhai continued to dream, fail, dream again, until he finally succeeded.
The sixteen failure, aka success, stories chronicled in this book are an attempt to start a conversation on failure, to encourage those reading the book to get out of the box, to pursue their dreams not for love of success but for the adventure of failure, to not let others decide the life you want to live for the fear of failure.
India today is brimming with entrepreneurial energy and new ideas. Private sector is thriving, the middle class is rising, more and more young people are joining the w