Here’s the Key to Turning Your Failures into Victories

We need to EMBRACE failure to appreciate success

Ravi Shankar Rajan
Jul 25, 2017 · 5 min read

In a western suburb of Tokyo, Kunio Nakamura, a former TV executive, sits hunched over an array of repaired earthenware in the bookshop-cum-café that he now runs. Since the March 2011 earthquake that shattered much of the eastern coastline of Japan, Mr. Nakamura has come to believe that one way to repair the nation’s broken soul is to revive and popularize the Japanese art of repairing ceramics, called Kintsugi.

In Japanese, the word Kintsugi means “golden rejoining,” a 15th-century Oriental master craft dedicated to the restoration of fine ceramic pottery. The essence of Kintsugi is the practice of focusing one’s intention on life’s hidden beauty and power.

CREDIT : LAKESIDE POTTERY

Most people would like damages to their broken items to be concealed and hidden by repair making the object look like new. But the Japanese art of Kintsugi follows a different philosophy. Rather than disguising the breakage, Kintsugi restores the broken item incorporating the damage into the aesthetic of the restored item, making it part of the object’s history.

The technique uses lacquer resin mixed with powdered gold, silver, platinum, copper or bronze, resulting into something more beautiful than the original.

Speaking of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in which thousands of people were killed and hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed, Mr. Nakamura says he realized “we needed to repair ourselves to remake things”.

Quitting his TV job, he began holding Kintsugi workshops in the country’s most devastated areas, encouraging people to bring in treasured ceramics that had broken in the earthquake and teaching them how to mend these. “For me, Kintsugi was a technique of healing,” he says.

According to Mr. Nakamura, Kintsugi embodies the indomitable spirit of the human race, which has time and again risen back from defeats, failures, and drawbacks to become the most powerful species on the planet.

In other words, real rejuvenation is not just about conquering defeats and winning over drawbacks.It’s about a total reinvention of self in which our imperfect pieces are alchemized into a beautiful, thriving more resilient masterpiece of ourselves.

Let us dig a little deeper and find out how Kintsugi helps us to reinvent our lives in three powerful steps:

Step 1 — Accept Yourself

The first step is to accept that the vase is broken and that is the hard brutal truth.

Kintsugi teaches us to steer clear of all self-defeating emotional conclusions, the “stories” we’ve constructed about how impossible it is for us to recover from our devastation, betrayals, and losses. It raises our self-esteem and tells us that there is no shame in getting defeated or having irreparable drawbacks.

Rather than focusing on the “impossible” situation in which we are in, it helps us to discover the “possible” in the impossible. The moment, we realize this, we release all our negative energies and move into the realm of constructive transformation.

The “wounds” become our “cures”, the “losses” become our “gains” and the “betrayals” become our most “precious” scars, we have ever earned.

Step 2 — Readjust Yourself

The second step is “repairing” or “readjusting” the cracks and joints of the vase by using a powerful adhesive.

The repair technique uses the sap of the Urushi tree, a powerful natural adhesive, mixed with powdered gold to fill cracks, elevating damaged objects into luminous objects of art. Unlike other methods of repair like welding or gluing, Kintsugi’ s power lies in its refusal to disguise the brokenness of an object.

It does not aim to make what is broken as good as new, but to use the cracks to transform the object into something different, and arguably even more valuable.

A philosophy, steeped in Zen Buddhism, teaches us to embrace our failures and drawbacks and identify ways and means in which, we can turn them to our advantage.

The “Gold” used in the adhesive represents our desire to be “healed” and this desire acts as the catalyst, the springboard to bounce back in life after devastation. Kintsugi encourages people to embrace their past along with its scars and create a new future with the same scars intact, repaired and healed.

Step 3 — Move Forward

The third step is “positioning” every broken piece in exactly the same position so that it again becomes part of the same original, unblemished vase.

Here Kintsugi is talking about resilience. It inscribes the vase’s story into its body: the moment of the breakage, the fact that it was loved enough to be repaired, and that it is likely to be handled with care in the future.

Likewise, each of us should look for a way to cope with traumatic events in a positive way, learn from negative experiences, take the best from them and convince ourselves that exactly these experiences make each person unique, precious.

Every single piece must be returned to its original position within our psyche if we are to transform ourselves from broken to beautiful. Every sharp fragment of shattered trust, defeat or failure must be carefully handled to avoid getting “hurt” again.

The only way to redeem ourselves from the ignominy of failure is to move forward and Kintsugi stresses it again and again in glowing terms.

Bringing it All Together

Kintsugi is all about shifting focus from what’s now lost, to what’s been gained. From broken to transformed. From less… to more. It tells us to honor our experiences because when we start doing that, we realize it’s only the splinters, nicks, bruises & breaks in your life that add value to it.

Kintsugi doesn’t happen without the piece first being broken. Nothing comes free in life. It doesn’t mean purposely looking for hardship. Nor is it staying stuck in victim-hood. It’s acknowledging that learning, success, purpose — all these things — require a price to be paid, which is non-negotiable.

As beautifully described by an unknown Japanese Poet:

Broken Hearts will glow

Broken Shreds will be made whole again

Despair seeped in the crevices of my broken heart

Love will overwhelm

I shall be made anew

A kintsugi.

About the author-:

Ravi Rajan is a global IT program manager based out of Mumbai, India. He is also an avid blogger, Haiku poetry writer, archaeology enthusiast and history maniac. Connect with Ravi on LinkedIn, Medium and Twitter.


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Ravi Shankar Rajan

Written by

Technology Manager,Poet,Archaeology Enthusiast,History Maniac.Also a prolific writer on varied topics from AI to Love.

Mission.org

A network of business & tech podcasts designed to accelerate learning. Selected as “Best of 2018” by Apple. Mission.org

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