FAILURE CAN BE GOOD
PERSISTENCE
FAILURE CAN BE GOOD
FAILURE CAN BE GOOD
Has life ever shown you that the right to fail is as important as the right to succeed? If we didn't have bad weather, we would never appreciate, sunny days. One hardly ever values his good health until he becomes ill. And I have never known a successful man or woman whose success did not hinge on some failure or another.
There is an old saying which goes, “It is impossible to succeed without suffering. If you are successful and have not suffered, someone has suffered for you; and if you are suffering, without succeeding, it is so that someone may succeed after you. But there is no success without suffering.”
Success in the world, any kind of success, is like a universal college degree. It can only be earned by following a certain course of action for a definite period of time. It is impossible for real success to be easy. Success also follows a kind of natural selection. Only those individuals who are willing to try again after their failures, those who refuse to let defeat keep them down for long, those who seem to have some strange inner knowledge that success can be theirs if they just stay with it long enough, finally win their diploma in life.
Most men and women who have earned success will tell you that often, just as they felt they were finally reaching the point in life on which they had set their hearts, the rug was pulled out from under them and they found themselves back at the starting line again, and not just ones once or twice, but many times.
Thus only those of patient persistence are rewarded. But those who do not achieve great success in life are by no means failures. They are successful in their way because they have what they really want. They simply did not want great success enough. They’re happy with what they’ve got --- and there is nothing wrong with that.
One day a young man came to my office and told me he wanted very much to make a great success of himself. He asked if I could show him the secret.
I told him to decide definitely upon what he considered success to be for him, and then work at it for twelve to sixteen hours a day until he had achieve it. And when he wasn’t working at it, to think about it. By doing this, he could reach his goal in perhaps five years or so. However, to achieve success, he must force himself back on the track every time he strayed off, realizing that failure are as necessary to success as an excavation is to a basement.
I never saw that young man again. I wonder if he took my advice. It is an unusual person whose desire is larger than his distaste for the work involved.
Successful people are dreamers who have found a dream too exciting, too important, to remain in the realm of fantasy. Day by day, hour by hour, they toil in the service of their dream until they can see it with their eyes and touch it with their hands.
A man learns little from victory; much from defeat.
CHINESE PROVERB
Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.
G.B. SHAW
by EARL NIGHTINGALE