The Real Meaning of "Lessons in Life"

Life is often associated to roses; beautiful but one should always be prepared to endure the pain inflicted by the thorns. The thorns represent the challenges and hardships that one has to encounter before achieving success because there can be no gain without pain in life. It is important to believe that everything in this world happens for a reason but it is up to us to seek the lesson that lies behind those occurrences.

People often think that failure is the worst thing that could happen in someone’s life. It is in our nature to think solely on the negative sides of something that had happened rather than thinking about the things we had accomplished even though it did not turn out the way we expected. Individuals nowadays prefer moping around after failing in something rather than looking on the bright side of it and make plans on how to improve so that they will not make the same mistake in the near future (Robert Kiyosaki, 2013). For example, after a student failed an exam, that individual normally has two choices. The first one is to meet his/her lecturer to know what went wrong and study harder for the next exam or the student persists in feeling depressed and sorry for himself/herself thus causing another failure. The right choice seems evident but many still have difficulties rationalizing their thoughts especially after a failure. It is essential to know how to extract the positive lessons one can learn from failure because every cloud has a silver lining. One thing that people do not realise is that failing to learn from failures is also a default itself. The Japanese word ‘kaizen’ which means constant or continuous improvement is a word to live by. For instance, in Islam, Muslims are encouraged to reflect all the things that they have done every night before going to sleep so that they can improve themselves constantly. That is a good practise that everyone should have because by doing it, we are actually training ourselves to accept our own mistakes.

The key to make constant improvement in life is first to assume all our wrongdoings. Failing to do so will result in a stagnant life filled with negativities. As simple as it seems, people are often blinded by their own ego making it impossible for them to see their own defaults hence resulting in their inability to implement this simple activity in their daily routine. In a nutshell, life is a cycle whereby we, humans learn something new every day. In some cultures, the word ‘life’ has typical connotations of success and failure by which one’s life is basically measured by his/her achievements and defeats. It is a shame that people have a higher tendency to judge something merely by looking at the results but not on the process and the effort need to attain those results. However, that should not stop us from making the most out of the lessons we have learned throughout our whole life because at the end of the day, those lessons are the things that made us who we are today.