People learn from failure — not from success. Failure alerts, success desensitises. Failure sharpens your sensibilities, hones your survival skills, makes you quick-thinking and spry. Paradoxically, I gain more confidence from failure than success. Continued success is stultifying, debilitating, even corrupting. This is not to say I do not welcome success — it's a wonderful thing, and there's nothing like success to spur you on, everyone who has been on a roll knows the heady feelings but continuous, unrelieved success can have negative overtones. It is like a land of Utopian conditions breeding lotus-eaters.

Bad business results are both a blessing and a curse. On the positive side, losing money, or a business setback shakes me out of complacency, gets me to focus, makes me receptive to change, if change is what was required but was, because of the complacency, not attempted. A setback hones skills in adversity management and arms you for the second round. A setback can lend urgency to an unsatisfactory situation, act as a trigger for change. I admit that it also gives less manoevuring room, but getting out of a tight corner may bring out resources and resourcefulness you didn't dream you possessed!

There's an old Sufi saying, "Let there be a storm in my life," which explains why it is necessary to have things go wrong. Storms are useful for everybody — they stir up stagnant air, sweep off the dust, and clear up the atmosphere. I must say I rather look forward to storms.