Do Not Judge me By My Successes, Judge By Failures

Do Not Judge me by my Successes: A brilliant quote by Nelson Mandela about success and failure. Success has a bad habit of painting a rosy picture. And somehow we belong to a culture where failures are brutally criticised and successes hailed to glory. However, at the core of it – these are merely outcomes. The successes manifest as favourable ones while the failures don’t. Ultimately both success and failure have a message for us.

It is up to us to decide what this message means and define our life around it. If you treat failure as feedback, you at least have a way forward. As Churchill says – Success is not final and failure is not fatal – it is our attitude that counts.

Do Not Judge me by my Successes

Just as we rejoice in these successes, there are also those moments when things don’t work in our favour and naturally enough we punish ourselves for not having achieved the outcome we wanted. It is bad enough that the world around us doesn’t appreciate us, but we make it a little worse by thinking about it a little too much and pushing ourselves down.

Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again
Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again

But such is our life, sometimes things do not work in our favour – sometimes it is beyond our grasp as to why it happened. The most important thing is to understand what this failure means. All we are left with is the outcome and how we treat it. We can feel bad about it and curse our luck, capacity, opportunities, resources and all those other things. But none of them is going to help us. The only thing that is going to define us is what we do about this failure, what we do about this setback.

Successes are nice, but how we react during failures displays our character. I think that’s the meaning of this quote by Nelson Mandela – do not judge me by my successes. Failure can very well be a negative outcome. Even if it brings us to our knees, that’s when our values are tested. The question to ask is – which values am I willing to sacrifice or do I still stand up to them even if it hurts? Moments of character-building are not easy, but they will be valuable as we grow further to embrace success.

Judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again

The other meaning of – do not judge me by my success is in understanding our reaction to failure. Most of us feel bad and tested during these uncomfortable situations. However, we ought to realise that even failure is an opportunity. It gives us a chance to begin again differently.

The choice as always is with us and we can decide what we make out of the situation. Sometimes it is just a test as to how we are going to face it and if I base it on our quote by Randy Pausch – sometimes it is just a test to see how badly we need something. And failure brings about something fascinating within us – RESILIENCE. Hence, our quote of the day is Nelson Mandela’s piece – do not judge me by my successes cos it is easy to respond to success but it takes something more than that to respond to a failure.

The choice is finally ours to define what these failures mean to us. If you’re able to create a narrative that helps you grow and face better-quality of challenges, then the failure is absolutely worth it. Failures are important and they only tell us that we’re willing to stretch beyond our capabilities time and again. And that’s a good thing no matter what others will try to prove it as.


20 thoughts on “Do Not Judge me By My Successes, Judge By Failures”

  1. True Jyothi, I think if I look back at my life, I have learnt a lot from all those big fat failures. It really felt bad to be facing all of them, but learning from them surely was one experience which I thoroughly gained from.

  2. That’s a beautiful imagery Mayuresh. I have always been fond of resilience, but very rarely linked it to hope. I think this opens a new road to the line of thought, hope is a wonderful aspect of motivation and it brings out a great amount of energy within us to work hard and go beyond the limitations imposed on us. And the imagery of resilience and hope guiding us towards success is a beautiful one. Thanks so much :)

  3. failure brings about something fascinating within us – RESILIENCE….and Resilience comes with Faith & Hope….this are the 2 things which keeps the world moving and allow us to come out of FAILURE…..I feel both Faith & Hope are like parents (Mom & Dad) guiding the child towards success…

  4. Thank you Swati :). Very true, each time we fall down, there is an emotion, a message that is being conveyed to us. If we are able to look at it closely and constructively, we can use it to our advantage and create a niche for ourselves.

  5. I believe this is a very mature and pragmatic way of looking at things Lata, works wonderfully well too. Those 4 questions are rock solid especially when we are down. I think most of us are naturally trained to think of the first question as WHY ME?! Instead if we replace by the questions you have put forth here, then there is some real chance for improvement and getting the feedback that failure was meant to convey for us.

    I have been a huge fan of these self improvement books and one of them goes a step ahead and asks the question – How can I use this. The very imagination of being in a place where we can ask these questions and focus on what is more important makes me look at life in an awe that our solutions are not as far as they appear sometimes.

  6. Ha ha, thank you Jyotirmoy, all credit to Nelson Mandela for giving us such a wonderful quote to talk about :) ..Successes sure lie in a lot of those failures.

  7. Thank you Maitreni.. I think most times when we read these books and published materials about success in life, people dramatically talk about the failures and successes as if it is a fairy tale. But I think there is so much that goes underneath which makes these people strong and achieve the heights they realised in life. The emotional challenges they face, the turmoils they go through and above all the decisions they take to stay on a chosen path is something which amazes me each time. That is one region where I feel that emotions are similar to all of us, no matter how big a person’s achievements are, but what we do with them and how we deal with them makes a tonne of difference .

    kudos to Nelson Mandela, he will always be an inspiring hero in my book.

  8. Vinay, one is likely to stay down when one worries too much about how other eyes are measuring one. If one’s own eyes are firmly on personal goal posts, chances are high that the only thoughts that will enter the mind are: (1) What caused me to fall? (2) How can I avoid falling next time? (3) I must get to my goal post (4) Is there a better path to getting there?

  9. Very truely said… It’s not about judging them my their success but by how many stairs they climbed and the number of downfalls in the way of that achieving that niche.

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