Failure

Most people, mainly do an MBA because for some reason, they believe that it'll give them opportunities that they didn't have before, because they would learn new things or even maybe because they will meet new people (network). But there's one thing that the MBA program (at least at Tsinghua) doesn't teach you.

How to overcome failure.

From day one, you're bombarded with case studies of companies and people, problems they faced and how they overcame them - or it's upt to you to analyse it and decide what's the best method they could have used to overcome it to achieve success. You're in competitions where nothing matters except getting the best score (sounds a lot like the GMAT). In the MBA world, winner usually achieves success and takes everything.

But unfortunately, in the real world. In the real world, failure happens - what happens when you fail? Sometimes you lose money, you lose a job, you lose a promotion, you even lose the girl. But the important thing is what did you do after the failure?

What went on in your mind the moment you realised you failed at something? How did you plan to overcome it? Maybe the lack in MBA education is that it doesn't address failure - comprehensively, or rather, at all. But yet, failure does exist, and it's a common thing. Especially in business. After all, how many tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of businesses and ideas/products/services fail each year?

We learn the many frameworks and theories that can be applied to remove risk and the unknown. That can be applied to better understand the situation, to develop a solution. But that is not full proof. People need to understand how to manage failure, perhaps even more so than how to be successful. As many articles have pointed out, failure is a great part of success - most people who are successful have failed at some point, but not all failures become successes - why? What differentiates somebody who is able to fail (sometimes repeatedly) but still get up and continue living and fighting for his future from somebody who fails, and just stays down?

We all want to be successful, but not everybody will be successful. Most of us will fail at some point, the question is, how do we manage our failures and become successful?

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Avicii - Penguin (Club Mix)
Randy Mortimer - Penguin (Club mix)

I prefer Randy's version. Anyway, most clubs are playing that. But they're both good songs.