Lessons About Loss & Failure That you Need to Learn Young

Now, this is something that I think everyone needs to learn and learn young. How to lose or fail and not let it destroy your life and your work or even your career. It takes a strong soul to lose or fail and embrace the fact rather than live in denial. Keep these few tips on your finger tips when you lose or anticipate loss – let it be the loss of a dog or a job or a career.

When you get knocked down, you need to punch the fuck back. In Luganda, there is a saying “ekigwo ekiimu, tekileema mwana kuziina,” which roughly translates to ‘one fall doesn’t stop a child from dancing again.” 

Get up, and act. Don’t get me wrong, I am not asking you to get physical unless of course you are in the boxing business.

There’s one thing to master. You don’t take that many hits without learning one or two important things about how to react, about how to go through it. But like any form of learning, patience is a virtue. Be prepared to learn from the loss or failure, pick yourself up, get dusted, and go again.

If you try to make excuses and explain it away, your insecurity is going to show and you’ll miss out on a chance to learn something. Many times, this is what happens when we lose, we shrug it away instead of accepting failure, and solving the problem at hand.

When we lose a job, we often blame it on toxicity of the workplace, we blame it on the bosses by calling them bad bosses yet what we should actually be doing is reevaluate ourselves and try to pinpoint what let to being fired so that we can fix it before we go back into the job seeking pool.

Now, this might come as a shock but it all starts with accepting that you have made a loss or that you have failed yourself. Burn denial out of your life. Denial can lead to your failure, as denial piles, failure creeps out of the crevices of success and waits for that final blow to take over.

I have many friends that have gone down the hill of addiction and mental trauma because of loss of a job. The denial, the constant excuses that replaced the work to be done. 

Men are dangerous, but I can’t and will never respect anyone who isn’t able to admit that they failed at something. Someone who is not willing to right a wrong.. Such a man is not man enough and deserves not my nor your respect.

Everyone at some point is going to meet failure and loss but one must learn to lose gracefully. It doesn’t make you less of a man to fall back and realize you made a mistake that led to a loss, and it’s only through losing gracefully that we can find solutions to our losses and better fix the gaps for a better future.