How to see failure as reference
why did Tim give up going back?
Life Lab is a practical lab where anyone can reflect their life with growing pains. We wonder your experience, no matter it is success or failure. We believe everyone can tell their failure for ourselves as well as future generation who will walk along the way where we have passed.
If you can time travel, what do you want to do?
In the movie About Time, Tim can time travel. His father taught him that he can go back and change his past in hopes of improving his future. How awesome! By time travelling, he succeeded in marrying a girl he fell in love with, having a cozy family, and spending his life more perfectly.
But he gave up going back to the past. He found out he could lose everything precious in his life. At that moment, he agonize over what he should abandon. Those moments were when he had to make crucial decisions, choose the most important priority, and his ego fell down. Failure moment.
Tim went back to the past to encounter Mary again, meet his adorable children, and play table tennis with his father for the last time. When he determined to go back, he went through unexpected failure sprung from his time travel. It was a series of failures that made Tim end up succeeding in what he wanted. Those trials finally created one success.
Tim read the book?!
In Li:Fe Lab, we read ‘reference rather than role-model,’ which contains interview contents. A few women in their twenties interviewed their references, not role-models. Given this book emphasizes the meaning of reference compared to role-model, it delivers a crucial message that everyone can become what they want even though it cannot be explained in ‘only one’ ‘existing’ job nouns(teacher, doctor, and so on). Be anyone who you dream.
As if Time had already read the book, he became who he had dreamed. But focus on what his father said. The content itself. His father who seemed Tim’s mentor told him what he failed and warned him not to repeat his failures. Tim followed his caution. However, what if Tim decided critical issues without his father? He had to think and do for himself.
Tim made his own decisions, then knew his lover much better, realized how much he loved his family, and finally admitted the reason why his father chose not to go back to the past and face his death. But he learned the most valuable lesson of his life on his own after his father passed away.
Tim Lake: The truth is, I now don’t travel back at all, not even for a day. I just try to live everyday as if I have deliberately come back to this one day, to enjoy it… As if it was the full, final day of my extraordinary, ordinary life.
Wake up! We cannot time travel.
As if Tim talked with his father, not just learned from him, I wondered: why do always interviewers in their 20s ask questions to learn from seniors? why are seniors recognized as successful role-models and are interviewers dreaming to be like them? All of people in their 20s can learn from themselves as Tim can without his dad.
In Korea, there is a coined word “Sam-po Sedae”, which means people in 20s give up three things: marriage, date, and childbirth. But is it right to say life that? Can we say that it is wrong that Tim might be miserable since he gave up time travelling? No, it isn’t. In fact, people in their 20s don’t want three things as Tim don’t want time travelling before. Then, ask ourselves. Why is there seemingly undeniable viewpoint that juniors have to ask some advice from their seniors not to give up their dream? Can they succeed if they can manage to get some reference from successful seniors?
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” (Sir Issac Newton, 1676)
The sentence above explains why ancestors are meaningful for the next generation. Even this sentence has its own root, going further back from George Herbert in 1600s to Bernard de Chartres in 1100s. Without their failures, how could anyone succeed in making progress?
Li:Fe Lab had a study on this idea ‘growing pains(failure) maketh growth(success)’.
By reading the book, each of us designed an interview with an interviewee and an interviewer in the book respectively. We learned that we had to focus on our target and be cautious about our interviewees’ stories since their stories are scarce and changing. Thus, Li:Fe Lab decided to break firm bias on people in their 20s and design creatively our own style to deliver the message we grow from painful growing pains.
Go back to our own Reference!
We cannot time travel. But we go through lots of growing pains as Tim did. Amidst those pains, we clarify priority and learn who I and we are. Thus, trust on yourself even though you feel like you need helpful advice from your seniors or you lack capacity to achieve your goal. Catch the failure moment and deliberately face your own growing pains.
Focus on not scarce and sweet success, but failures living close to you.
Today, what did you suffer from your growing pains?
