There is no person in this world who has never fallen or failed in life. Even the most prominent figures have ones been unsuccessful. Abraham Lincoln failed many a times before becoming the president of the USA. The world-famous basketball player Michael Jordan was removed from his college basketball team. J.K. Rowling, the world-renown author had to go through an agonising period of seven years, prior to publishing her famous fantasy series Harry Potter. She had to go through a sequence of events such as the death of her mother, the birth of her first child, the divorce from her first husband and poverty up until her first novel was launched. Challenges are common amongst all human beings.

Each and every human being under the sun must abide by rejection, separation and loss at some point in life. Therefore, everybody must realise that failure is common to everyone, may it be a king or a beggar. If failure and drawbacks are mutual, then what actually differentiates the winner from the rest? What actually differentiates winners from the others is the time that they take to bounce back from the point of failure. Some people never bounce back. You might wonder if there are people who don’t bounce back and what can be the reason for it. Well think about people who commit suicide.

They are the ones who actually refuse to bounce back, they believe that failure is the ultimate outcome of life, which they cannot overcome successfully. We have seen people who remain single till they die, simply because they’ve lost the love, they have been awaiting to spend the rest of their life with. We also see people giving up their education when they fail an exam at their first attempt. These are the people who have chosen to refuse bouncing back in front of failure. There is another segment of people who opt to bounce back but they consume a great amount of time to go back and face the battle of life. As we all know time is precious. It is considered as one of the pivotal factors in attaining happiness.

Realistically speaking time is an exchange for money, therefore a person cannot afford to stagnate in a fallen pit for a longer period. Giving up or quitting is a disastrous attitude that could also act as a destructive weapon which could destroy one’s personality. Quitting doesn’t show up overnight, it is rather a seed that has been fertilised and nurtured over a period of time. If a child has a habit of quitting from his early childhood, he will grow up to be a man who would always seek to quit tough situations due to his mindset. His mind has been programmed to quit as a result of his childhood behavior of constantly quitting, which will turn out to be his natural behavior later on.

When your child refuses to attend school on rainy days, don’t nurture that act of quitting, train their minds to challenge the obstacle, by advising them to think of how they could attend school even on rainy days. By doing so you are training your child’s mind to move forward amidst external challenges. Furthermore, when your child is reluctant to attend a function because he thinks that his clothes are not up to the standard of his friends, educate him with love, about the reality and guide him to participate the function.

It will undeniably train him to live a life of contentment, to live with what he has. When my son Joshua lost a table tennis game in a tournament Instead of being sad and mad, I started appreciating him saying “I am proud of you, and the way you fought back is marvelous”. There is no doubt that you should train your children to do their best, but everything will be of no use if they suicide when they fail to get 9 A’s in the exam. What is more important is for you to train your children to bounce back as quickly as possible and continue the battle of life in good spirit.

I have seen parents advising children not to cry, which in my books is an unhealthy practice. Laughter and tears are two extremes of emotions. A human being is a blend of a rational and an emotional mind frame. On one hand the more rational a person becomes the more prone he will be to lose the beauty and the sentiments of life. On the other hand, the more emotional a person becomes the more probable he will be in making disastrous emotional decisions. Life is like a Sri Lankan cuisine palate. Just as we crave to consume spicy food, we also crave for sweets such as chocolates. Laughter and tears are two different flavors that mold a person to become a strong personality.

If people are trained to avoid crying, they will lose the sensitivity of life, which is a predominant pulse of happiness. A successful man is not a person who doesn’t cry, but a person who will wipe away his tears and pick up the sword and return to the battle field. When my father dies, I will surely cry, I will cry a lot because I am surely going to miss his presence in my life immeasurably. But it doesn’t mean that I will stop moving forward in life and that I would go and live in solitude in the forest. Once his corpse has been buried and the time of mourning is over, I will surely go back to work and start concentrating in my role as a CEO. Just imagine the time you’ve wasted, thinking over and over again about your failures and stagnating at the point you fell. History cannot be reversed by anyone, therefore contemplating on what has already happened will not do any good to you.

It is alright to evaluate your history for the purpose of learning, so that you will have wisdom to overcome similar situations in the future. As I mentioned previously, time is very precious and we all have only 16 limited hours to be with our families, as well as to work and expand in our careers. This is the precious time that you are wasting by stagnating and pondering over and over about your failures. Determine to bounce back strongly and challenge your challenges, then you will definitely be able to sharpen your defending tools. There is nothing wrong in falling, what is wrong is wasting your time at that point of failure.