In 2020, my grandmother’s legs became swollen. Despite the best medical care her son, a trained doctor and an entrepreneur could afford, there was no reverse in the decline trend that was taking a toll on her walking. In 2024, I had a month to spend with her, sharing the same house. Her days were mostly spent in the lounge where she had to sit on the floor watching TV as sofas, beds and stairs had become an invention not for her again. At night she retreated to her sleeping area. In both of these places, the floor was her place to sleep or sit.

Her other grandkids were around. The then-youngest was already walking, having made his first steps two months ago. This youngest grandkid and grandma exhibited similar qualities to me. The younger had fallen a record countless times while learning to stand up and walk, and the resemblance between him and Grandma was plenty. Grandma thought getting some help to get to her leisure place during the morning and to her resting place at nightfall was a do-it-yourself project. She protested any form of help. We had a habit of forcing our help in but all to no avail. Grandma was failing, but she insisted she could try on her own. I asked myself a question: Why do ageing people think they are still good at taking care of themselves? A job which they are failing at.

When you are in the prime of your strength, you are reckless. Of course, being endowed with energy does mean that you are resourceful with it. So, you scatter your strength unnecessarily all over and forget to pinpoint it on the fewest things that mean progress in your life. This prime phase is short. For people in athletics, the prime phase is even shorter. The encroachment of old age seals of the end your prime era, and quickly turns it into history. As if old age is one thing to make humanity realise the errors made in the limited prime third and the irrecoverability of the time past, aged humans tend to be different. Their focus is on effort and not results. An effort-centric approach as opposed to a result-centric approach is friendly to failure. The effort-centric approach doesn’t attract failure but it knows failure is not avoidable if you want to be successful, and it moulds figures who learn from failure and succeed where the odds are against them.

is the schedule through which we live our lives. We live our first third fast. At first, we are helpless, and we start to learn to rise and walk on our own. We value failure and help as the basis through which success can be achieved. We fall countless times before we can walk normally. Our eagerness to stand up after falling is unmatched. We soon start to go to school. At this point in life, society and formal education start to contaminate us. The once valuable process of failing and learning from failure is quickly replaced by a process of working hard and getting good results. Failure is treated as an enemy. Results and not effort are what we have to improve. Results are graded as well to differentiate the too good from the average. This is utter contamination.

I believe that learning is (1) being taught and (2) teaching yourself. By default it is our inner solutions to the problems we have that makes a difference than outside ones. Teaching yourself is a solution coming from the inside. When pathogens get into our bodies, our immune system is active before we can add any medication which can help it. Failure is that which makes a partnership with your in-house learning solutions, that is learning from self. Once we take learning from failure down, we erase one-half of our learning.

Our second third starts earlier at sixteen for some, while others would have to wait until their twenties. It is a phase of achievements and erecting structures that will support us once our strength is gone in old age. But we are contaminated beings chasing after results hoping to achieve bigger things in life. We are contaminated because what failure must be half of our learning process is inactive their lives. We spend much of this third frying to avoid failure. Since the rule is failure is unavoidable, one who goes through it willingly, learns, while one trained it is broken down by it. Contamination is the reason why most of us end up average or even worse.

In our last third contamination seems to be on its retreat. We start to instinctively value learning through failure when all forces are pulling us down and failing so that we can learn from failure. Winning on the first try is not for everyone. But anyone can endure without being an expert at what he is doing.