How Failure Leads to Success.

(From The News (Nigeria) - AAGM)

Byline: Sylvester Asoya

In His New Book, a Date With Failure, Somi Uranta Examines How Failure Results in Success. He Spoke With Sylvester Asoya On the Lessons He Intends to Teach With the Book.

What attracted you to the subject of failure?

I see failure as the most important ingredient in the formula for success. From my own life, I realised early that if I need something, I had to go the extra mile to get it. Be it education, good life, fortune or what have you.

I always travel the extra kilometre. Even, my ancestral home, Queenstown Opobo in Rivers State is an island. To access it, you have to endure the risk of travelling on the sea for about an hour. So for me, this is not the sweetest of experiences but one has to contend with it.

What I am trying to say is that these inhibitions and handicaps are experiences of failure and they add up to the total success. I see my life as the proverbial housefly on whose entire body you can never find blood except at the head, and by the way, you would have killed it to get to that point. My life has followed this pattern since I became conscious of myself and my environment. But I have always asked myself: should I remain flat on the ground after each fall or should I stand up and try again? Of course, I obeyed the latter. When you experience failure, your ability to learn the lessons of failure makes success inevitable. I will give you an instance. Charles Goodyear invented the vulcanized rubber out of a failure. His wife was very sick. While he was nursing his sick wife, the chemical he was heating in his laboratory next door, caught fire and burnt down the entire laboratory. With a stick, Goodyear decided to check the charred remains of his cherished laboratory. Lo and behold, from the burnt lab emerged the vulcanized rubber which is today moving the entire world. On the other hand, Thomas Edison was said to have an atrophied mind by his teacher. But this did not stop him. He went ahead to invent the incandescent light bulb after failing ten thousand times.