There’s a version of this story I could tell you where everything makes sense in hindsight. Where each failure was a carefully placed stepping stone. Where I look back and say, “I’m grateful for every stumble.”
But that would be a lie. And I’ve grown tired of lies dressed up as inspiration.
The truth is messier. The failures didn’t feel like lessons while they were happening. They felt like evidence. Evidence that maybe I wasn’t cut out for this. That maybe the gap between who I was and who I wanted to be was simply too wide.
I want to tell you about that gap. And what it actually costs to keep crossing it, again and again.
The First Time I Failed at Japanese
I remember sitting in front of a Japanese textbook in my early twenties, convinced that if I studied hard enough for a few months, something would click. I’d been told I was “good with languages.” People around me made it sound achievable. Maybe even natural.
It wasn’t.
I stumbled on the scripts. The grammar structure, which is almost the reverse of how we speak in Marathi or English, kept slipping out of my hands the moment I thought I had it. And the worst part wasn’t the confusion. The worst part was the silence after. When you try to form a sentence and what comes out is something almost right but not quite, and you watch the other person gently, politely correct you, that silence after carries weight.
I stopped. Not dramatically. I just… slowly stopped.
And then, a few months later, I started again.
Not because I had some epiphany. Not because I found motivation in a YouTube video. But because the alternative, giving it up entirely, felt worse than the embarrassment of trying again.
That second attempt also didn’t last. Neither did the third.
What changed, eventually, wasn’t my discipline or my talent. What changed was my relationship with stopping. I stopped treating every pause as a failure and started treating it as part of the rhythm. Like breathing. You exhale. You rest. You come back.
Ten years later, I work in a role where I use Japanese every day. Translation, interpretation, client communication. Not because I was gifted. Because I kept coming back.
What Failure Actually Looks Like From the Inside
We talk about failure in such polished terms. “I failed and learned.” As if failure is this clean, contained event with a lesson wrapped neatly inside it.
In reality, repetitive failure feels like fog.
You can’t always see what you’re doing wrong. You can’t always identify the lesson. Sometimes you fail the same way twice, three times, and the only thing you learn is that you haven’t figured it out yet.
At Hirameki, early in my role, there were projects where I was responsible for communication across two very different professional cultures, Japanese and Indian. I made assumptions. I miscalibrated tone. I sent emails that were too direct for Japanese sensibility, or too formal when the moment needed warmth. I over-explained where brevity was expected. I misread silence as approval when it was actually polite hesitation.
Each of these wasn’t a dramatic failure. There were no fireworks. Just quiet misses. Moments where I could tell something had landed slightly off. And the harder part was that I didn’t always know what had landed off. Only that it had.
You sit with that. You turn it over. You adjust.
Not once. Over and over. For months.
That process doesn’t feel like growth while you’re in it. It just feels like confusion with occasional flickers of clarity.
The Difference Between Repetition and Repetitive Failure
There’s something I’ve noticed though. People often confuse repeating an effort with repeating a mistake. They’re not the same thing.
When I kept returning to Japanese, after stopping, after starting again, I wasn’t just repeating. I was returning with a slightly different version of myself. One who had lived a few more months, read a few more things, built a little more context. The study material was the same. But the person studying had shifted, even imperceptibly.
Repetitive failure becomes meaningful only when you allow yourself to be slightly changed by the experience between attempts.
If you go back to the same situation carrying exactly the same assumptions, you’ll get the same result. That’s not persistence. That’s stubbornness.
But if you return carrying a question, what did I miss last time?, then the next failure becomes a more precise instrument. It teaches you something narrower, something closer to the real problem.
That’s the process. Not one big lesson. A hundred small calibrations.
On Writing, and Failing Quietly
My creative work has followed the same pattern, maybe even more painfully.
Writing is strange because the failures are invisible. Nobody knows about the drafts you abandoned. Nobody knows about the essays that felt alive in your head but turned flat the moment you put them on paper. Nobody knows about the times you sat down to write and produced something so mediocre that you closed the document and told yourself you’d try tomorrow.
Tomorrow sometimes took weeks.
“Face of the Inner Voice” didn’t emerge from a burst of creative confidence. It came from years of circling something I wanted to say. Feeling the shape of it before I found the words for it. The failures there were quieter. A paragraph that didn’t honor the feeling. A metaphor that reached too far. A truth I was too cautious to state directly.
What I’ve learned is that creative failure has a particular flavour. It tastes like distance. The gap between what you feel and what you’ve managed to put on the page.
You close that gap not through inspiration. You close it through repetition. By writing badly enough, often enough, that eventually the distance shrinks.
What Nobody Tells You About the Middle Part
Every story about perseverance jumps from I failed to and then I succeeded.
Nobody stays long in the middle. The part where you’re neither failing spectacularly nor succeeding clearly. The part where you’re just… continuing. Showing up. Doing work that might matter or might not. Not knowing.
That middle part is most of the journey.
It’s unglamorous. It doesn’t make for good content. There’s no arc to post about. Just a person, doing the work, not yet knowing what it adds up to.
I’ve spent most of my professional and creative life in that middle. Learning a language slowly. Building competency in ERP systems one difficult project at a time. Writing drafts that went nowhere. Attempting podcasting and stepping back. Coming back to it.
The middle is where character is actually built. Not in the dramatic failures or the celebrated wins, but in the quiet decision to keep going when there’s no particularly good reason to.
What Repetitive Failure Builds, Eventually
I want to be careful here. I’m not going to tell you that failure builds resilience, or grit, or some other well-worn word.
What I’ll say instead is this: repetitive failure builds familiarity with discomfort. And that familiarity changes you in subtle but important ways.
When you’ve failed at something enough times, the fear of failing at it again becomes smaller. Not because you’ve become reckless. But because you’ve survived it before. You know what the inside of it feels like. You know you can come back from it.
That’s not the same as confidence. It’s something quieter. A steadiness. A willingness to try again without needing to guarantee the outcome first.
In cross-cultural work, bridging India and Japan through technology and language, that steadiness matters enormously. Because cultural misunderstanding is not a one-time event. It’s a recurring texture of the work. Every day brings new moments of slight uncertainty, of “I’m not entirely sure how this will land.”
The only way to function well in that space is to be comfortable with imperfect attempts. To try, to adjust, to try again. Without treating every miscalibration as a verdict on your worth.
That comfort doesn’t come from reading about failure. It comes from accumulating it, slowly, over years.
A Note to Whoever Needs to Hear This
If you’re in the middle of a repeated failure, the same language exam, the same kind of project going wrong, the same creative block, I won’t tell you it’s all going to be fine.
I don’t know your story well enough to promise that.
What I’ll say is what I know from mine: the repetition itself is not the problem. The problem is only if you return carrying nothing from before.
Bring something back each time. A question. A different angle. A willingness to be wrong in a new way.
And if you have to stop for a while, stop. Come back when you’re ready. The work will still be there.
The middle doesn’t last forever. Not because you’ll suddenly break through to the other side. But because, slowly, the middle itself starts to look different. What once felt like being lost starts to feel like knowing the territory.
That’s not success. But it might be something more lasting than success.
It might be understanding.
Sahaj Ravindra Balgunde writes about technology, language, identity, and the spaces between. He works as a bilingual developer and consultant at Hirameki Solutions, bridging India and Japan through ERP systems and cross-cultural collaboration. He is the author of “Face of the Inner Voice” and is currently writing “The Light and The Shield.”
JA
