Stepping Stone to Success
We often hear, “Failure is the stepping stone to success.”
What does this actually mean? Is failure really necessary? Can there be success without it? Over time, I’ve come to appreciate that the saying isn’t meant to be interpreted literally. But yesterday, for a brief moment, it was.
My husband was trying to book train tickets to travel within India.
We are visiting family here.
The first transaction took forever and finally the payment went through after 10 tries over 2 hours. Hurray!
But then the transaction failed without giving us any reason or details. We were confused how payment succeeded but ticketing failed.
We almost gave up and requested for a refund. But then there was an option to retry or revive the failed transaction and it worked.
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My husband started the second booking and, strangely enough, was waiting for it to fail.
I looked at him, confused.
“Failure is the stepping stone,” he said with a grin. “We’ll just revive it.”
Sure enough, the transaction failed, we hit Retry, and moments later the tickets were confirmed.
Though I wasn’t super thrilled with the overall experience, I couldn’t help smiling.
For once, failure was literally the stepping stone to success.
#Day 14_2026Writing
