10 Life Lessons I Have Learned Through Failure With ADHD
The only 10 you will ever need unless you improvise and fail on your own!
Failure is a fascinating subject in my life, as someone who suffers from Attention Deficit Disorder, I can say I have had my fair share of failures from school to life, and even beyond. Failure is one such factor I believe, I have an accomplishment in, yes you heard it right, it has not only helped me to help students and people from all backgrounds but to also appreciate and value life as well.
“Have no fear of perfection — you’ll never reach it.” ― Salvador Dali
I have failed thousands of times, perhaps that is a topic for another day. Today, I believe it is something of a reminder it is the day I failed to graduate. Yes, but I’m not worried because of the pandemic it’s obvious, I don’t feel down I feel much better, I feel relieved.
“There’s always some relief in giving up.” ― Lauren Oliver
This pandemic has given me a sigh of relief, and thus I feel somewhat blessed to have been given a break from it all. People make these systematic processes a big deal. Kindergarten, Nursery, Pre-School, MiddleSchool, Highschool, College, University, Post-Doctoral School, and beyond.
So many schools, yet I have been in all of them, perhaps not the post-doctoral one that is a pipe dream, I’d rather not have — though my professors and peers would say otherwise.
I believe I have been in schools for as long as I can remember, It was perhaps when I was 3 years old when I went into Kindergarten, ah those were the days, running around in the school grounds having PT sessions on Wednesdays, and the canteen breaks with friends sharing our lunches, not all of it is bad, to be honest, there are many memories I treasure from my experience.
Failure is imminent when it comes to education much so if you have hyperactivity and perhaps short term memory issues though it’s hard to say for me what fits. At times in my middle school years, I came to a point in my life where I failed for the first time like I got my first 49% in a semester term, you can imagine the faces I saw staring at me, it was an underwhelming feeling, to say the least, plus the screaming teachers at your face does remind you of a bitter time.
“My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.” ― Jack Kerouac
And the parental practices that follow, getting my arse beaten by my parents as I had soiled their respect down in the drainage with my pathetic result — the thrashing follows. It was inevitable, it was a tough time in my life much to anybody who knows.
I kinda really started to experience difficulties when I would write answers, I would write difficult or I would say complex answers to questions and not simple ones — the dilemma most teachers would have is that you are asked “yes or no” but you write all the interpretations that come towards the question.
I know, I know… you can fairly realize the hyperactivity when it comes to my answer sheets, though it was never respected nor it was taken that way. And when you study with people who can fairly memorize and rotta learn different things, people who produce concepts from their critical thinking skills having hyperactive issues won’t be respected for their input or their output, and thus fail miserably at every test they would do.
1. It teaches you humility
Well, it hurts a lot being called stupid, mentally retarded, and even a godforsaken failure from even the ones you love. It can be pretty depressing, you might even cry in the boy’s bathroom perhaps, by taking an excuse from the 5th period at 1 pm in school, every day to hide away your tears from everyone so that you bother neither your parents nor your friends with your problems.
“True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.” ― Rick Warren
As you’re already a failure, you’re just gonna be a nuisance to everybody and let’s be honest society and schools don’t value people who fail, there is a certain stigma you will always bear.
But let me tell you something my dear friend, “you are nothing but someone who wills to change” your failures are nothing but an accomplishment that those people around you will never understand. Because you found ways, they never could.
“It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.” ― Mahatma Gandhi
Humility will build endurance, you won’t feel sad neither will you feel bad afterward, your outlook on life will change. You won’t even worry about the short term misery and even the depression that most people get when they experience failure like their life is about to end. You’ll just dust these minor problems off from your shoulder, in a jiffy.
This quality is going to reward you beautifully in life as you, my friend will stand out always in the crowd by the smile you possess by severing through many difficult obstacles in life — an open-mindedness towards appreciating that all failures are lessons ready to be mined once the opportunity arises.
2. It will build tolerance
It can be tough, you probably will also face abuse. Verbal, physical, mental; many await a failure. But don’t fret, you are not alone. I know as a child if you get hit, it feels really bad at times when all you did wrong was a poor mathematical calculation, I know sometimes we all make mistakes when it comes to Algebra and Trigonometry, perhaps my favorite subjects of all but there is a lot of pain that’s connected towards these memories and thus those failures that came through such experiences.
“The highest result of education is tolerance” ― Helen Keller
I believe if you can bear the physical abuse, you can stay strong even in the most life or death situations because you can tolerate the hardship that will come through your efforts.
Tolerance is an excellent quality because it will decide how much pain you can struggle with in life, perhaps you might even smile as I used to when my teacher would hit me, it was a certain grin on my face. Alas, it didn’t help much as you’d get beaten almost everywhere.
“Laws alone can not secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population.” ― Albert Einstein
Like they have to teach you a lesson and hit you where it will hurt, perhaps a stick on your buttcheeks would be a strict method so that when you sit, you will have a proper focus while channeling the pain, and focusing on the problem. But nobody would point that you might have a disorder, Nah you’re being lazy — the best answer for all people who fail.
And you lack focus, Why should we use only a single method of solving a problem when there are other methods as well!? Alas, a question some mathematical teachers struggle with when they teach their students.
“Love thy enemies, it says in the scriptures. My foster mother always added, “At the very least, you will be polite to them.” ― Patricia Briggs
But overall, in time you will learn that even your fists and your body will bear the pain. You might even become a bit stubborn but that’s okay at least you’d be smiling your way through it because it wouldn’t matter anymore.
“Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day.” ― Markus Zusak
You would try to learn and focus, and even pass at a value that helps you move forwards, and you will tolerate everything with the qualities perhaps forcibly build in you through such experiences.
Thus, tolerance will play a key role in helping you stay firmly planted in your shoes when the going gets tough, you will tear through it all whilst standing strongly on the ground with a smile on your face.
3. You will make the best of friends
Friendships, you won’t be isolated from them. You will make the best of friends when you become a failure, people who have crafted themselves through the sheer struggles of life, aiming to become their better selves and in turn nurture others like them.
“Friendship … is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .” ― C.S. Lewis
These friends aren’t gonna be like the assholes who belittle you just to crack a joke, sure the jokes might be somewhat funny and weird but these people will stick by you in even the situations where life and death are just but dangling on a fine thread. The people you meet on the precipice of failure, are the ones who will indefinitely carry and connect with you till the day you die.
“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.” ― Elbert Hubbard
But even then, your memory will live on through the experiences you shared. Companionship such as this is hard to find in a world that is filled with greed, but people who fail to become a part of such a system are the ones who don’t care about the materialistic values of our world.
They will entertain, empathize and excite ourselves to do the most outrageous of stunts and will never leave us, The friends I made during this time were probably pretty different from each other, each having their significant traits and qualities, we found each other and were able to relate to everything. We felt at peace, we would drop off each other, to our homes.
“The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.” ― Bob Marley
We would leave one person at their home, he would say come in let’s have lunch. We would have lunch together, and then he would say let me drop you off to your home, it would be a cyclic process but I believe we would do the same for each other when exams would come we would help each other study using our different strengths in different courses.
I would help them with physics, biology, and literature, and even maths. They would help me with languages, history, and chemistry, and social sciences.
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” ― C.S. Lewis
Some would even push me to do PT because that’s necessary for maintaining good health. Everybody knew us, as the most lively people who wouldn’t let failure decide what we faced, and how we faced it.
We became pretty prominent as students who became a symbol of hope for failures like us, that they could have meaningful lives that inspired others to form bonds of companionship as well and thus a hope scintillated the hearts of many who faced such forms of failures.
4. You will learn the value of pain
It is going to be a painful journey — a life of being a failure. It is going to hurt you in ways you can’t even imagine. It will be very different than what you visualize and what you feel at that moment, the greatness of the heartache and the agony can be immensely stressful.
“Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” ― William Goldman
You might even curse God, that “Why did you ever give me such a horrible life?”. There will be times when you would cry, perhaps alone because you don’t want to bother anyone, there is a concern in your heart that somebody might have consoled you, we all have that when we cry, we think for it for a moment, and it disappears just like that.
It’s pretty normal, that feeling of someone who worries for you, who will save you from this feeling. The only one who is coming for rescue is yourself, that is the cold hard truth. I apologize dearly, to anyone who ever faced this. I do regret that I’m not here to hold you when you feel such forms of pain, as did I once.
“More smiling, less worrying. More compassion, less judgment. More blessed, less stressed. More love, less hate.” ― Roy T. Bennett
There is a significant lesson in pain, and learning from pain and understanding its value and perhaps the lessons it bears if we tolerate it successfully. It helps us to value its effects on ourselves and others meanwhile helping us to realize that we can share ourselves, and become compassionate as a byproduct that is derived through learning from pain.
Becoming compassionate will help us to connect with everyone who feels this way, and it will feel a lot less gloomy and blue, perhaps we might be there for the many people who ache for someone to hold them during all that grief trying to push them down to the pits of despair.
5. You will become an empath
Learning the value of pain, and becoming a compassionate soul helps you to empathize with others, another amazing quality that failure bestows upon you. Though you will fail in this regard too countless times, it will perfect yourself to a degree that helps others see the better version in themselves as you did for you.
“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.” ― Leo Buscaglia
Empathy comes from all the relevant struggles you faced in life, failures, abuse, so much trauma that you dealt with. But it made you into such a stronger person, why? because you, my dear friend have persevered and will persevere through it all.
Being able to relate to what someone feels is the best feeling in the world. You can connect to everything even the animals around, even the insects that roam in the grass. Becoming self-aware about everything that surrounds us is something that waits for you in the journey of life that you will gain someday.
“We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.” ― Dietrich Bonhoeffer
As you have failed countless times, you know the value of communication and thus you will be able to better empathize with any other situation there is in your life that persists. A form of kindness that you will exhibit, through your choices, knowingly and unknowingly impacting every other person to become their best selves and making them feel loved, and secure.
6. You will become kind
Humility teaches you humbleness, pain teaches you to become compassionate, empathy teaches you to become connected and understand the feelings of another. Pain and hardships though you will bear many in life will help you to become much kinder in a stronger sense.
“Always be friendly, always be kind, Like the most beautiful flower that you can find.” ― Debasish Mridha
You will dominate other people’s senses using your strong presence through your kindness and piety. Your friendliness will open newer bridges towards people and providing an opportunity to create bonds of friendship and consideration towards other people.
“Kindness trumps everything. Kind people are magnets for all of the good things in life.” ― Tom Giaquinto
Your behavior will influence other people to practice generosity and kindness. It will inspire other people to realize that they can do better with their choices, such as another form of value that you will generate time and time again through failure.
7. You will harness intellect through practice
Failure teaches us a fundamental aspect that it’s okay to seething another way, in doing so we carefully realize our mistakes and how we can use our choices effectively to yield a better result.
“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” ― Aristotle
One thing that failure has taught me is to practice everything you learn and fail at it. If something works for the first time, you should try another way of doing it. I usually find 50 to 100 solutions for a given problem to learn if the problem might persist in an actual situation.
Because there is a form of uncertainty when it comes to realizing or predicting an outcome based on a given input. Therefore, by practicing many ways you will be able to save time and resources when the time comes to implement such a solution.
“It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied.” ― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Failure is the only way you can predict the performance and the effectiveness of the solution you’re building for the problem. Other solutions that you may find can become an effective troubleshooting guide if later on, you run into a problem.
“Indubitably, Magick is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgement and practice than in any other branch of physics.” ― Aleister Crowley
All of these critical thinking processes help you to harness an intellectual capacity that helps you towards becoming pretty clever at finding your way out of a maze of problems, the hyperactivity that I have always helped to guide myself at an alarmingly fast rate giving me the ability to process a multitude of aspects at once when it comes to solving a problem.
8. You will learn to respect the time and value of life
Failure is something that truly benefits the person who fails, time is a luxury in life. We don’t know when it will run out, or how much do we have. Thus, if we fail in life way too often it will award us with the patience that will help us to see the value of time and also life in itself.
“How did it get so late so soon?” ― Dr. Seuss
Being a failure, or perhaps called one; some might even say that you’ve never achieved anything great. But I don’t believe that even for a second, because you have seen ways they never could. Just because their method worked doesn’t necessarily mean yours won’t. It will just take time, and you have to enjoy the process of finding what works for you.
“They say I’m old-fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast!” ― Dr. Seuss
If you take shortcuts, do X in Y minutes, and try to escape the learning process, sure it will give you some form of success but you won’t have the satisfaction nor will you have the capacity to value what you achieve. It will be a race for you, every time you do something. You won’t enjoy it. It will become a tiring activity for you.
Failure allows you to think things through, it isn’t meant to belittle you or even cause you to feel that you’re not enough. It’s the opposite, it gives you the chance to just give up for a while, go and appreciate life, and the time you have left.
“The timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness. And knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.” ― Khalil Gibran
Sometimes, failure will give you a chance towards a doorway that you can use to escape this mess of a prison that just demands you to comply to a set of rules to succeed.
Failure will help you break that cycle, and thus allowing you to give value to the things that matter in your life more than the race that we all are put into as soon as we are born.
It will be the friend, who ushers truth upon you; one that will always be fulfilled in time when you accept the value it brings and perseveres the hardship it offers.
9. You will find faith
Belief is an important factor, that plays a vital role in life. Though there have been times in my life where I felt low, and I had nowhere to run or hide. Faith in yourself and God does help you to have a positive outlook on life.
“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien
Religion is something very definitive if you don’t hold any cognitive bias towards it. Well, it is the same if you don’t hold any bias towards anything in life but that’s kinda hard sometimes than most.
Giving up hope can help you sometimes in life but it just brings grief and sadness though they build tolerance, an excess of such for long periods is just bad for your mental health.
“God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas but for scars.” ― Elbert Hubbard
Faith instills the drive to leave your worries in the hands of God and helps you to focus on your goal. You leave everything else towards the creator, and you focus all your might, everything you have towards working in finding your self and your solutions that will reward you with success.
“All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
Belief in one’s self is as important as belief in God, I’m not a preacher but I’ll say this that if it wasn’t for these two things, it would have been difficult to come this way so far in life. I wouldn’t be here writing this if it wasn’t for these two factors and that’s the ultimate truth.
The peace belief will bring, and the joy it will usher for you and your efforts that you do in every instance will be awesome. There is more to us than just our perspectives, and failure is another blessing that will award you with this miracle in life, that will never waiver, never falter, and never fail.
10. You will realize your purpose in life
We’re all in search of this feeling of finding a purpose in life, ever since we are little. We are shown ways we can grow, dreams that we weave, and hopes that we conjure. Yet life and society do well to break such hopes of finding value in life and our happiness becomes a distant memory.
“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The only thing that is left is to realize that we aren’t enough and thus we fall into the trap that our society brews for most of us in the race of slavery. Failure just shows you the ways that work, and the ways you don’t. You will find your strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps, if you’re like me you will try everything and fail at it multiple times, to learn the ways how you could succeed.
“None of us knows what might happen even the next minute, yet still we go forward. Because we trust. Because we have Faith.” ― Paulo Coelho
Going through a life of failure and hardship, I realized something very profound, all the abilities that my journey had built into me and all the people that I had helped along the way — everything just clicked, I was able to build people, from the ground up — I even built startups and mentored individuals belonging to different walks of life, ethnicities, and even places.
Failure taught me to understand other people’s emotions, their circumstances, and even to build certain qualities in people so that they maybe realize the fruition of their efforts in time.
“Be Brave and Take Risks: You need to have faith in yourself. Be brave and take risks. You don’t have to have it all figured out to move forward.” ― Roy T. Bennett
If you fail, you will find your purpose. If you keep on walking on a straight line of success, it will cap your growth. Failure is necessary if you want to grow as a person, an individual, and even a human being. Your personal growth is directly dependent on how many times you fail, and how many times you learn from such failures.
Thus, it is allowing you to understand the fundamental principles of life’s experiences and also to realize many paths that you can take to fulfill yourself in life.
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
There is no one path to take, and that is what failure certifies you to accept. You have a multitude of things at your disposal that you can do with your time and your life. Thus, be free because that is what failure allows you to understand and don’t feel too bad even if you are one. Be proud that you did fail, and accept that you are one.
I believe there are many times, we feel shame that we are failures, but look at it this way, look so much you can learn through the journey of being one, and this is what is going to set you apart from everyone around you. This is going to make you a gentle human being, who accepts and values others and also who can look past his grievances and be able to make the best of what they have.
“It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.” ― Theodore Roosevelt
There is so much that awaits for you in life, but if time does run out remember to accept defeat, it will help you to value what you have left and also to live the remaining moments with zest.
Stay Blessed and Stay Safe!
With Love ❤️
