Failure

Success is good. It is easy to handle or at least it seems easy to handle. But I need to learn to handle failure. A lot of emphasis has been laid on the various learnings from failure. However, the entire experience is quite dramatic. You feel that you won’t be affected, but you are.

So at my institute, I would say I was very well placed in terms of the number of opportunities I had after the initial round. I interviewed with a couple of companies and the results were not immediately disclosed. However, once I got the first result and that to a rejection, the sadness was clearly felt. I have written this an hour after the rejection. The sadness is dying down and now as I reflect, I am wondering if I was justified in actually being sad. If I get sad, I think I would be asking too much for remaining happy all the time. There are many who have just only shot where I have so many.

Thankfully, I had a very good friend who cheered me up. This friend was kind enough to listen to me and talk to me which helped a lot.

Not that this rejection was the end of the world for me, but somewhere subconsciously I was looking forward to getting a positive response. All the indications were towards that but finally what happened was not what was being indicated. Anyways, now I am over that (though not completely).

Now, something entirely unrelated but things which I found interesting …

Option-writing has been described as “picking up nickels in front of steamrollers”. This is in relation to the fact that it is a contract in which you can lose more than you have invested.

Booking losses at the right time is one of those qualities which are not easily found among people in general. People tend to get attached to their investments. So, even if the value of the investments is decreasing consistently, they keep hoping that the next bounce back is just around the corner. For all they know, the movement may be along a circle. A good quote pushing the idea of booking losses in stock markets or any other financial markets

“Stocks don't know you own them. You can sell them and they don't care."

- Craig Effron, a hedge fund veteran (taken from Bloomberg News hedge fund reporter Katherine Burton's book ‘Hedge Hunters’).