Have you ever seen a successful person who has never faced a single failure in his life? I don’t think so!

If you want to be successful, at some point in your life, you have to take risks, whether it is a calculated risk or expanding your horizons. It’s quite difficult to chase your dreams without any risk. Though the risk is failure-prone but nothing can substitute the experience you are going to get. Swami Vivekananda once said, “Take risks: if you win, you will be happy; if you lose, you will be wise.”

So there isn’t anything like a failure, only experience! And by experience, you become an expert someday. Let me make it simpler for you. Do you like to cook? Imagine what happens if you do not dare to cook? What if you are not willing to take the risk of adding spices and salt in the dish? Will you be able to enjoy delicious dishes? Of course, you can order food online or dine out, but you may not be able to enjoy the food of your own making, right? And you may never be able to crack the code behind that aromatic food. Similarly, if you have to spice up your life with proper salt and sweetness, then you have to take the risk. This is the solitary path to convert your life from ordinary to extraordinary and mediocre to magnificent.

Remember what John A. Shedd once quoted, “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for”. The beauty of life lies in continuous progress. Life is beautiful when it has a flow, you might have noticed the staleness of stagnant water. The same is true for our life too.

There is a Chinese Proverb “Pearls don’t lie on the seashore. If you want one, you must dive for it”. If you want pearl of success, then definitely you have to take the risk of diving in the deep ocean of knowledge, hard work, practice, and patience. There is no shortcut for that.

And how can we forget Mark Zuckerberg’s views on the matter –

 “The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”

If Columbus had not taken the risk, nobody would have explored the world and you would not have remembered him for anything. There are many more life examples Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Bill Gates (to name a few) from whom we can learn about how to bounce back. There is not a single person who is successful but never failed even once in their life. They have failed so many times but their risk appetite never extinguished, and they surely learned how to bounce back. The greatest benefit of taking risk is to overcome your fear. The fear of failure, fear of conformity pressure of society, fear of comparison, and fear of being criticized. When you overcome these hurdles, it boosts up your confidence, increases your ability to bounce back, and changes your outlook towards life.

Everybody wants to be a Diamond, but very few are willing to get cut. Remember, to shine like a diamond, you have to take the risk of being cut and polished.