Inspirational

Why People Fail? – A Biblical Perspective

June 4, 2016
“Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the doing, not the getting; in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be.”
– Zig Ziglar

 

The Story of Michael

Michael was born in 1965, in the US. At the age of 15, he bought his first Personal Computer with the money he had earned from selling stamps.  He then opened the PC and took out its parts one by one to learn how it worked. When Michael was in high school, he canvassed subscriptions for a local newspaper by using his PC to send out personalized letters to potential customers.

Never Bury Your Talents

He earned $18,000 for that job with which bought a BMW car.  He was all of 17 years old then. In the next year, Michael enrolled himself for the first year in the Texas University. He needed to earn money to continue in college.  

This was the period in world history when Personal Computers were spreading which triggered a boom in its demand. IBM was more or less the sole producer of computers those days. IBM shipped the PCs to its dealers who sold them to retail customers at substantially higher prices earning huge profits. Michael thought he could sell PCs at much lower prices.

 The dealers of IBM PCs had stocks that they had to compulsorily lift at fixed intervals from the IBM warehouses to retain their dealership. But, often the dealers could not sell all the PCs they bought from IBM. The funds of the dealers got stuck in the unsold inventory. Michael bought these unsold stock from the dealers at the wholesale price the dealers paid to IBM. But he had no place to keep those PCs. He could not take them home since he mostly hid his business activities from his parents. So he brought those PCs to his college dormitory. There he customized them to cater to specific needs of individual customer. He sold those PCs at 15% below the price that the regular dealers charged. His business flourished.
 
But before long, Michael was thrown out of the college dormitory, PCs and all.  So he moved his PC business in to his car. The demand for his PCs accelerated while Michael’s university grades nosedived. His parents grew concerned. They suggested that he could get into any business he wished but only after completing his university degree. But this young man believed that if he waited for a university degree, he would be missing the opportunity of a lifetime. So he simply quit college. His parents were devastated.  They asked him what exactly he wanted to do.  “Compete with IBM”, he said. His parents laughed derisively.  
 

On May 3, 1984 when Michael was just 19, he risked everything he had to incorporate his company. And by the time he would have graduated from the university, his company was selling seventy million dollars’ worth of computers in a year.  This company grew to be one of the giants in the field of computers and of course a rival to IBM. He proved that he was not joking when he said his goal was to “Compete with IBM”.  That was Michael Dell whose company was ‘Dell Computer Corporation’.

The Secret of Success

Before we turn to its secrets, it is essential here to get some clarity on the idea of success. We know that, depending on the perspective of people, success could mean anything like, amassing more wealth, acquiring more power, becoming renowned, and finding contentment, peace and joy in life. In other words, the term success has different meanings for different people. And the concept of success applies to both individuals and organizations. In both cases, success is essentially the realization of the dreams they cherish.
 
When it comes to organizations, success is guided by its Mission and Vision statements. The former says why the organization exists and the latter tells what it dreams to accomplish at various stages of its existence. So for an organization, success is realizing the dreams captured in its Mission and Vision statements. It tries to actualizes its dreams (and therefore tries to become successful) through efficient and effective utilization of the unique set of resources like money, manpower, material and machinery etc. at its disposal. This is what business management is all about.
 
However, in this article, the focus is only on individuals. Every individual is born with a unique bouquet of resources in the form his or her natural skills. We use the term talents to describe these inherent human skills. The mix and strength of these skills differ in different people. From among this basket of skills that each individual is endowed with, one or two skills stand dominant. This is to say that a person can perform at least one task more skilfully than many others. That is the person’s strength. And for this reason, the person would succeed in life only by putting his strength into optimum use – the essence of management at an individual level.
 
Let me now try to elucidate this point of strong and weak talents through the familiar story of a baby rabbit. This story was once told by Azim Premji, the Chairman of Wipro, to a group of management professionals at Mumbai’s National Center for Performing Arts. The story goes something like this:   
 
There was once a baby rabbit. On reaching schooling age, its parents enrolled it into a rabbit school. Every morning the baby rabbit donned his school uniform, slung his school bag and water bottle over his shoulder and hopped on to the school bus. There were two subjects in the school syllabus for the baby rabbit to study. One was hopping and the other swimming. At end of the first term, the report card arrived. The baby rabbit had top grades in hopping. But in swimming, his grades were miserable.
 
The parents were deeply concerned.  They said, “Forget about hopping.  You are anyway good at it.  Concentrate on swimming.”  I assume that the rabbit parents might have also said, “Why don’t you look at the frog.  It hops as well as swims.  If the frog can do it, there is no reason why you can’t do it?”  The baby rabbit was distressed because it was afraid of water. But the parents would hear no excuses. So, they arranged special swimming training for the baby rabbit. And guess what happened in the end? The rabbit lost its talent to hop!  As for swimming, have you ever seen a rabbit swim!
 
Concluding the story, Azim Premji said, “While it is important for us to know what we are not good at, we must also cherish what is good in us. That is because it is only our strengths that can give us the energy to correct our weaknesses.” 
 
The point is that while the frog could swim as well as hop, it was not very good in either. But the baby rabbit had the talent to hop. It would rank him among the best in hopping. So, if the baby rabbit had to succeed, it had to focus exclusively on hopping. The rabbit parents missed this truth since they were looking at what others did.  Many human parents too miss it for the same reason.   
 
Thus, the secret of success is that there are no secrets of success. Remember that Michael Dell had no expert coaching to help him succeed. He did not have even a university degree. Yet he has been giving lectures to MBA students in the University of Texas. This is more or less the case with most big achievers. Steve Jobs of Apple Computers and Bill Gates of Microsoft Corporation are just two such people. These people achieved enormous success while millions of others, who had better IQ, education and financial background, struggled all through life achieving nothing noteworthy.

The big achievers of the world only used their innate abilities to become successful.  So, in this article, the term ‘success’ is used to mean accomplishing something valuable through the optimum use of the gifts of natural abilities (talents) without necessarily becoming rich, glamorous, powerful or famous.

If it is true that people succeed because they effectively employ their potential to succeed, it must also be true that people fail because they ignore to put their best skills to optimum use. I believe that the ‘Parable of the Talents’ that Jesus told, inter alia, establishes this. Of course Jesus told the parable some 2000 years ago when  terms like ‘Scientific Management’, ‘Motivational Theories’ and ‘Management Gurus’ were not in the lexicon. Yet the parable seems to be pregnant with the lessons to succeed.

The Parable of the Talents

This Parable, as appearing at Mathew 25: 14 – 30 in the English Standard Version (ESV) of the Bible, is reproduced below: 
   
“For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property.  To one he gave five talents*, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away.
He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them, and he made five talents more. So also he who had the two talents made two talents more. But he who had received the one talent went and dug in the ground and hid his master’s money. 
Now after a long time the master of those servants came and settled accounts with them. And he who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five talents more, saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me five talents; here I have made five talents more.’  His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ 
And he also who had the two talents came forward, saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me two talents; here I have made two talents more.’  His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ 
He also who had received the one talent came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.’ But his master answered him, ‘You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed?Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming, I should have received what was my own with interest.  So take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

*Talent was a measure of money. Some Biblical experts say that a Talent was the equivalent to 20 years’ wages for a common labourer in those times.

Why People Fail?

Let me make it clear that I am not proposing to discuss any spiritual ideas that the parable seeks to convey. My interest on the three servants in the parable is limited to examining the reasons why the third servant failed while the other two succeeded. So, further discussions would use the term Talent not as a measure of wealth but as the natural skills that every individual is endowed with. While everyone comes with the gifte of a set of talents, its mix as well as the strength of the talents within the mix is different for different people. For instance, rabbits have the talent to hop; Michael Dell the talent to recognize and exploit a business opportunity, Albert Einstein the talent to be a Physicist and Michael Angelo the talent to be a painter and sculptor. They understood what they were good at, did it and achieved huge success. But imagine what would have happened if Michael Angelo tried to discover the theory of relativity and Albert Einstein to paint the Sistine Chapel!  
 
Based on what has already been discussed,  let me try to figure out the the reasons behind the failure of the third servant we find in the parable of the talents:
 
1.  The third servant did not understand that each individual is gifted with his or her own unique set of talents. He himself was holding a talent of substantial value. But he could not recognize its true value since he was distracted by what others had. He was like a man who sat on a calcite mount crying for a piece of chalk.
 
Lesson-I: Never be distracted by what you do not have or what others have. Keep your focus exclusively on the talents (resources) you hold in your hands. If you wish to succeed, be content with what you do have, understand its real worth and act to put those to optimum use. Many people ruin their lives being miserable about what they do not have instead of being happy about what they do have. 
 
2. The third servant went and hid his talent in the ground when he had several other options to use it fruitfully. For instance, as suggested by his master, he could have entrusted it with the bankers and earned an interest. He could have invested in on some other assets and enjoyed capital gains. He could have loaned it to others in need. But he did nothing because he had no faith in himself or others.  
 
Lesson-II: Be confident. Believe that you can. All those big achievers are people like us who had mustered the confidence to act differently. Remember, “Life’s battles do not always go to the stronger or faster man.  But sooner or later, the man who wins is the one who thinks he can.”   
 
3. The third servant was angry towards his master since he gave more to his friends. Even the second servant could have raised similar grievances. But the second servant was grateful to his master because his master had chosen him for his special favour when he could have  chosen someone else. The third servant failed to see his blessing. He was ungrateful to his master.  
 
Lesson-III: Count your blessings. You might not have everything you wished. But you have much more than many others around you have. If you think you are poor, your would be poor sooner than later. Believe that your mind has a lot of influence on what is actually happening to you. Think and act rich and contented. Be grateful for the love, care, trust, consideration and sacrifices of others. Stay grateful if you wish to succeed.  
 
4. The parable says that the servants were given talents according to their abilities (to manage it). The third servant apparently jumped to the conclusion that he got the least since his master thought he had the least ability to manage the resources entrusted with him. But the truth could have been the opposite. The master, perhaps, gave the least to the third servant since he had the most confidence in his ability to succeed even with that least.
 

Lesson-IV: “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade“. Have faith in the goodness of people. Have faith in others and ourselves. Never harbor self-destructing thoughts that everyone out there is an enemy scheming to annihilate you. This world is much better than you often think. The gifts you are endowed with are much more valuable than you think. Discover them. Employ them. Stop creating imaginary enemies.

5.  The third servant says to his master, “I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground.” We may consider this as an expression to indicate his genuine fear of the consequences of failure. It might also be a lame excuse to cover up his inaction. Anyone who fears that the outcome is going be bad has no reasons to succeed.

     Lesson-V: Life is beset with risks and there could be no guarantee of success on anything we undertake. Even the biggest achievers had there share of setbacks. But all set backs are not failures. Thomas Edison once said, “I did not fail.  I have only discovered that there 10,000 wrong ways of doing the thing.”  The steam engine, the electric bulb, or the airplane did not happen overnight.  It happened after thousands of aborted attempts.  So, never we give up. If you wish to succeed, be prepared for failures.  

6.  The third servant says, “Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.…” Had the master been a hard man, there was no reason to entrust his wealth with his servants. Obviously, the third servant was accusing his benefactor to hide his laziness.

     Lesson-VI: There are no shortcuts to success. Success is not for the laggard. It is the fruit of honest hard work. Never blame your own lethargy on others wanting to help you. So, if you want to succeed, keep your nose to the grindstone. Never try to bluff or impress through devious means. Remember, ultimately, truth alone prevails. And in life “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

7. The Master says, “So take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” Some readers might find it uncomfortable that the master should take everything from the poorest and give it to the richest. I believe that the lesson from the action of the master is that when you do your best with whatever you have been given, you would acquire what you did not have in the beginning. Also, that when you keep your talents buried in the earth (idle) you will lose it. (Recall how the baby rabbit lost his talent to hop by not focusing on it).
 
Lesson-VII: Identify your talent. Put it to best use. You would be rewarded with surprising boons. Stay idle. Let your talents rust. You would lose whatever skills with which you have been gifted. So stay sharp. Stay active. He who understands and appreciate the value of one’s blessings would receive more blessings.  He he does not will lose whatever blessings he has.
 

8. Finally, the issue of attitude.  Simply stated, attitude is a complex mental state involving beliefs, feelings, values and dispositions that make us act in a certain way in response to a certain situation. Attitudes are very critical since the way we respond can make or mar us. The third servant in the parable had an attitudinal problem. He was angry, frustrated, hateful, jealous and vengeful.  So his action was bad. And his reaction (to his master) was worse.  No wonder he brought catastrophe upon himself.

Lesson-VIII: Right action arises out of right frame of mind. Wrong attitudes have dangerous consequences. If you wish to succeed, think positive thoughts. Be in peace with others and yourself. Think soberly and act constructively. Remember we have not been sent here to change the world – at least most of us are not. Our sphere of influence is limited. Nevertheless, we can achieve a lot in this life for ourselves and for others, by leaving “the world better than we found it, Whether an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul”; but only if we retain the right attitude…    
 
———————-
   
Azim Premji Dell IBM Michael Dell Parable of Talents Steve Jobs Warren Buffet

Only registered users can comment.

  3. Nice thoughts, all may agree. Life is not a bed of roses.There is education for employment , education to acquire knowledge and self skilled people.Talented are the gifted skilled.
    As far as our economy is concerned it lasts for thirty years only then the decline starts so to be content and adjust to the situation is practical. Anyway an inspiring write up .

    s

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *