I got this video forward on Whatsapp – by a Teacher giving advise to her kids – might be on graduation or a reunion. It was in Tamil.

Here is the gist of her talk which resonated with me.

“I wish you lot of problems. Life is not easy. I wish you failures. You might wonder how come I am wishing you failure. There is a reason.

Success does not teach you anything. Success puts you in a drunken state and you will settle for less.

Failures will keep pushing you forward.

Go after a bigger challenge. Bigger competitor.

You should fight big and fail. It is ok if you do not get the Trophy at the end but you should have fought hard.”

I totally agree with her.

If I brand myself a failure and say I keep searching for bigger and bigger battles to fail – how awesome it will be.

I have seen this from people with early success in life – the toppers from colleges.They do not take risks as they are afraid to fail. They are not ready to take a cut on their salary to work on a challenging project. Instead they are stuck at their current job – being paid well – but a boring job.

If you brand yourself as a failure, then there is no pressure in failing. This sets you free to go after risky battles.

Want to enter a territory with your product where you are going to be killed. So be it – give a fight. What if you survive?

Want to release a crazy feature which you believe will give 10x productivity – and only some customers will love, but majority might reject. So be it – build it. What if it becomes mainstream and majority would start using it?

Fight risky battles with no pressure of becoming a success. Then your focus is on fighting the battle and not the outcome. The outcome will come on how good you fight the battle – not by pressurising yourself that you want success.

It is a mind shift.

It is like a negative feedback. In control systems Negative feedback is what makes the system stable. Positive feedback makes it race and runs towards instability quickly.

Failure is like the Negative feedback. Success is like the Positive feedback.

If we can embrace failure – it is similar to negative feedback. It ensures stability. It will help us in focusing better on the problem and working on it.

If our end goal has to be success – we will not take the risks that are needed sometimes. It will put undue pressure on ourselves.

I embrace you failure.

Now I go conquer the world or might fail spectacularly.