The one skill nobody will teach you
More than 30,000 universities in the world and not one has a course on this. Guess what skill?
Last month I had gone back to the co-working space that we had been occupying before the lockdown hit us. It was a ghost town. A place that would have tens of people bustling around on every floor had one or two people sitting around. It was sad to see this. But not as sad as finding out that one of the founders who used to work there had committed suicide.
The lockdown had hit his business, caused a lot of losses and he did not know how to dig himself out of it. He chose to take the ultimate step and put paid to his life.
According to certain estimates, there are about 7.7 Million schools in the world and there are about 30586 universities in the world. None of them teaches the one thing that you are sure to be faced with in life.
HOW TO FAIL.
And then get up, dust yourself, look forward and move ahead.
Even the Tiger has a success record of only about 52% of the hunts. If it could understand human language, it would have lost self-confidence, self-esteem, self-worth - given up on hunting and died of starvation. Nature teaches it, not to bother and to try again.
COVID-19 killed about 2.5 Million people last year. 800,000 people take their lives each year according to Our World in Data. In other words, every 40 seconds a person takes their own life.
Some of them might be victims of abuse with severe mental ailments unable to cope, but I am certain a vast majority of them are people who just were not taught how to cope with failure.
A child cannot learn to walk without falling. A person cannot learn to talk without mumbling first. You cannot learn to ride a bicycle without falling. Every step of doing what it takes to be human involves failing but nobody will prepare for precisely that.
This is an indictment of the entire education system on this planet.
Imagine if we just got this one thing right - How many lives would be saved? How many more people would take risks? How many new discoveries would be made? How many problems would be solved?
Just imagine…
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What we think, we become ~ Buddha
So true sir, students are always taught how to enjoy success, but never how to handle and face failures bravely with a confident and determined smile :( I think parents should start this, followed by teachers, then only we can redefine the mindset.