Tuesday, January 26, 2010 @ 9:16 PM: Failure and success
In binomial distribution, one always considers two cases: failure and success. The society judges success by different ways - in terms of status, money earned, qualifications, etc. As such, people usually congraulate those who succeed (like scoring tonnes of As in examinations, getting a gold medal in a prestigious competition) while at the same time reject failures - which is pretty normal!
And ultimately the boundary between success and failure is just a thin line to draw. A guy may have gotten 10A1s and 1A2 in an examination, and looked upon as being 'successful' by his peers and parents, while he might think himself as a failure deep inside. Similarly, a sportsman may have got gold in a competition, but might think he is a failure in the competition as he has not met the expectations he has set. In these cases, the main character might tell others that 'hey I don't really succeed', and might be looked upon as an insult. And this is where different expectations come into play isn't it? Success and failures are just a certain level of expectation which people have set for themselves or others where they either met it or not.
And thus, I would like to apply a different dimension to the word success or failure which can be seen as a more 'equal' playing field for everyone. It is a matter of whether you have tried your best in whatever you want to do. I have had a good taste of that in bridge. I would always take a good day of bridge as one where I made no mistakes and had brilliant plays with logical bidding sequences; while a bad day of bridge would constitute errors that could have been easily avoided with more thinking. There could be days where you would win a lot on the table due to your mis-bids finding the correct slam that would be impossible to find by correct and normal bidding. What people say is that the end-result matters or some bring more to the extreme of 'it is my brilliance that has resulted in this contract', but I think you have failed in the context. Simply because you have made a wrong move that wouldn't earn you a good score for 90% of the time. In other cases, people would always slam each other when a competition is lost. You would always hear things like 'you can never bid like this, you know this costs us the first place?', but seriously when it is the correct bid, just accept it and move on. Partner hasn't failed and you should appreciate the times that the correct bids have paid off.
As seen for the examples, luck has been a main factor that makes the difference. Be it good luck or bad luck, tell yourself that the success or failure you have had due to it hasn't been really under your control, and you have tried your best in every instance, and be proud of it! If circumstances are down, change it and even if you can't change it, always do the best out of the situations!
And once you know you have tried your best, you know you do not deserve the tag 'failure'. Smile and move on!
thank you for bringing me memories...
