"We Are All Failures--At Least the Best of Us Are"

"We are all failures--at least the best of us are," I read today in an email forwarded from a college academic dean.

"Failure is simply a price we pay to achieve success."

You can't always reach every goal you set for yourself,

anymore than this buck we saw in town yesterday can leap every size fence.

The next time you find yourself envying what successful people have achieved, recognize that they have probably gone through many negative experiences that you cannot see on the surface," writes John Maxwell in his book, Failing Forward: How to Make the Most of Your Mistakes.

Not everyone in college makes an A grade on their first assignments in English Comp I, 

especially not when they have been sick with colds and flu and they didn't have a computer to start the semester,

and when they did get one, the program wouldn't work right,

and then the printer wouldn't work at first either,

and papers that would otherwise have had a good grade had to be turned in late.   

It's easy to feel like a failure when a poor grade is staring you in the face,--or when people around you are deciding you didn't make the grade in other areas of your life.

People are training for success when they should be training for failure. Failure is far more common than success; poverty is more prevalent than wealth; and disappointment more normal than arrival. —J.WALLACE HAMILTON”

 

More from Maxwell--

Procrastination is too high a price to pay for fear of failure. To conquer fear, you have to feel the fear and take action anyway. Forget motivation. Just do it. Act your way into feeling, not wait for positive emotions to carry you forward.

Recognize that you will spend much of your life making mistakes. If you can take action and keep making mistakes, you gain experience.

“Failure isn't so bad if it doesn't attack the heart. Success is all right if it doesn't go to the head.”  

We saw this pumpkin head at the farmer's market where we stopped to check for marked down vegetables.

The greatest battle you wage against failure occurs on the inside, not the outside.

Why worry about things you can't control when you can keep yourself busy controlling the things that depend on you?
Embrace adversity and make failure a regular part of your life. If you're not failing, you're probably not really moving forward.

 Everything in life brings risk. It's true that you risk failure if you try something bold because you might miss it. But you also risk failure if you stand still and don't try anything new.

The less you venture out, the greater your risk of failure. Ironically the more you risk failure — and actually fail — the greater your chances of success.

The more you do, the more you fail. The more you fail, the more you learn. The more you learn, the better you get.

While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior. —HENRY C . L I NK”  

Success comes in taking many small steps. If you stumble in a small step, it rarely matters. Don't gift wrap the garbage. Let little failures go.”

“If you're not failing, you're probably not really moving forward.”

“The first important step in weathering failure is learning not to personalize it.” 

[Below is a flock of sandhill cranes flying noisily over our house.]

 “Helen Keller, author, speaker, and advocate for disabled persons, asserted,"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”

 If you are succeeding in everything you do, then you're probably not pushing yourself hard enough. And that means you're not taking enough risks. You risk because you have something of value you want to achieve.

" “Novelist Victor Hugo believed, "He who every morning plans the transactions of the day and follows out that plan carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life . . . But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident, chaos will soon reign.” 

“When it comes to taking risks, I believe there are two kinds of people: those who don't dare try new things, and those who don't dare miss them.” 

 “Great minds have purposes; others have wishes."

The whole idea of motivation is a trap. Forget motivation. Just do it.”  

“If at First You Do Succeed, Try Something Harder”

“Every successful person is someone who failed, yet never regarded himself as a failure.”

“If you tend to focus on the particular events in your life, try to put things into perspective. When you do, you'll be able to share the philosophy of someone such as the apostle Paul, who was able to say, "I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content."3 And that was saying a lot, considering that Paul had been shipwrecked, whipped, beaten, stoned, and imprisoned. Throughout everything, his faith enabled him to maintain perspective. He realized that as long as he was doing what he was supposed to do, his being labeled success or failure by others really didn't matter.” 

 "Fail early, fail often, but always fail forward.”

-John C. Maxwell