कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन। मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि॥

Shree Krishna’s words in the Bhagavad Gita are often translated as a lesson in detachment, but in translation they risk losing their quiet depth. “You have the right to action, not to its fruits” is not an instruction to abandon desire or effort. It is a reminder about where we place our emotional weight. Wanting to succeed is natural—it is often the reason we commit, strive, and work hard. But when our sense of worth becomes tightly bound to a specific outcome, success can overwhelm us just as deeply as failure can undo us. The teaching, at its core, asks for something subtler: to act with sincerity, while loosening our grip on how the story must end.

Everyone fails. There’s no secret to success hidden behind perseverance quotes or heroic narratives. Most of us fall short in small, unremarkable ways—projects that don’t work out, relationships that quietly unravel, versions of ourselves we invest in and then outgrow. What we do next is often reduced to a single instruction: pick yourself up and move on.

But failure is rarely that simple.

Failure is often spoken about as a necessary step toward success, a temporary setback in a longer, upward journey. Try again. Try harder. Try differently. And sometimes, yes, that story fits. But history—and lived experience—suggests a quieter truth: failure is not always a stepping stone forward. Sometimes, it is a full stop.

A closure.

An ending that clears the ground—not to guarantee something better, but to make room for something different.

I’ve learned this the slow way. Not through dramatic collapses, but through moments where effort continued long after meaning had drained out of it. Times when I stayed not because I believed, but because leaving felt like admitting defeat. I told myself persistence was strength. That stopping would mean I hadn’t tried hard enough. That if I just adjusted my expectations, softened myself a little more, things would eventually work.

They didn’t.

What failed, I realise now, wasn’t just an external goal. It was an idea I had about who I needed to be in order to deserve a particular outcome. When that idea collapsed, it felt personal. Heavy. Like proof of inadequacy. But with distance, it became something else entirely: an acknowledgment that a certain chapter had reached its natural end.

Failure, then, is not always a verdict on worth. Sometimes, it’s simply an acknowledgment of completion.

Samuel Beckett’s oft-quoted line—“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”—is usually read as encouragement, almost motivational. But I’ve come to read it differently. Beckett wasn’t promising success. He wasn’t even promising improvement in the way we like to imagine it. He was pointing to honesty. To continuation without illusion.

And yet, even this idea has its limits.

You don’t always need to try and try and try again to succeed. Sometimes, what’s required is not another attempt, but a pause. A willingness to stop. To admit that continuing is no longer brave—it’s just familiar.

I’ve had to sit with that discomfort: the fear that stopping would look like giving up, that it would invalidate the effort already spent. But stopping doesn’t erase what was learned. It doesn’t negate sincerity. It simply refuses to carry something forward once it has outlived its purpose.

Failure can be a release from old narratives. From identities we keep performing because we once committed to them. From expectations—our own and others’—that no longer fit who we are becoming. It breaks the attachment to outcomes that quietly begin to define our self-worth.

What follows failure is not always success. Sometimes it’s uncertainty. Sometimes it’s smaller, quieter, less impressive on paper. Sometimes it’s just space. But it is space without the constant hum of proving, fixing, redeeming.

Growth, I’ve learned, is not guaranteed. But clarity often is.

Failure strips things down. It asks uncomfortable questions. It reveals what we were holding onto out of fear rather than conviction. And in that clearing, something honest can begin—not necessarily better, but truer.

Perhaps failure isn’t a lesson to be mastered or a hurdle to overcome. Perhaps it’s a passage. An exit. A permission slip to begin again without dragging old explanations and unfinished justifications behind us.

Not all failures are steps forward. Some are endings.

And sometimes, endings are exactly what allow life to move again.

There was a moment when I stopped trying—not dramatically, not with certainty, but with relief. Nothing immediately improved. Nothing miraculously fell into place. But something loosened. I slept better. I breathed more freely. I stopped rehearsing explanations in my head. That was when I understood that some failures don’t ask us to rise again—they ask us to rest, to release, and to trust that life will move even when we do not force it forward.