Page 14 - Failure to Triumph - Journey of A Student

‘Sir, I have been preparing for the last four years, but I haven’t tasted
success yet. Could you please guide me to find the right approach?’

I have been asked this question several times. The only difference in
the questions is the duration of preparation. Some say that they have
been preparing for three years, some say four, some even five and
more. However, I do not think that this is the right question to
confront me with.
The most pertinent question that you should ask yourself is- “What
was it that I changed in myself during the time interval between my

last two unsuccessful attempts?”
The questions that should follow this question are: Did you do a
postmortem of your failure? Did you analyze your failure well
enough? What did you learn from your defeat? Are you repeating the
same mistakes again?

Remember: Not analyzing failure is a recipe for future failures.
“You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures
teach you."- Barack Obama
It could be possible that a considerable amount of your time and
effort is dedicated to your favourite subjects. This also means that

you are not working on your ‘weaker areas’. If this is how it is, things
are not going improve even if you prepare for the next ten years. It
may also be possible that your concepts are not clear, or someone
has misled you in to believing that you just need to solve the past
papers to ace the exam. This prompts you to completely neglect the
theory and concepts.

There is a huge possibility that every time you walk into an
examination hall your fingers are crossed in anticipation of finding
the identical questions in the exam paper. You feel scared by
thinking that if the questions are different then you won’t be able to

answer it. This makes you apprehensive of the question paper at
hand. The Roman philosopher Seneca said, “There are more things
to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more often in
apprehension than reality.” The apprehension makes you more
anxious; it cripples you and your mind is no longer calm. Your

apprehension worsens the situation. What if you ended up in the