Mike Krause 15 Jan 2010

Choose your thoughts and your words carefully.  The way you describe a situation sets the foundation for not only you going forward, but especially for others around you and it affects how things play out.

There’s certainly more to life and living than what we can control but we are at the center of our own life and of our own living.  All thoughts about us by anyone radiate from ourselves with ourselves at the center.  Give yourself the upper hand and consider that any situation is an opportunity to learn and improve, don't let it be “a problem”.

In my opinion, a “problem” can be perceived as a stopping point or as the beginning of the end. “Challenges”, however, may be taken on as opportunities for improvement—points along the way that we will remember as being “the learning of the piece” or as “a moment of growth” instead of as a stopping point.

In both your thoughts and words, keep the goal in mind.  Describe events as being turning points, not as the end of trying or as the point at which “only someone else can fix things”.  Take on challenges as being your own.  Give yourself the chance to learn new things and to grow.  Accept the fact that growth and learning involve trying and that trying leads to success only if you persist.

Goals can be adjusted by way of the evolution of our thoughts. As we take on challenges, we learn. What we learn can be used to adjust and refine our goals.

I believe that perfection comes from being complete, not from being right—not from avoiding “problems” by not trying to resolve them.  Legend has it that Colonel Sanders was turned down one-thousand and nine times before his fried chicken recipe was accepted once!

Before I die, I plan to make many more mistakes.  I feel that if I stop making mistakes, it’s either because I’ve stopped trying and therefore stopped learning or because I’ve died.

The following quotes about “failure” were obtained from CreatingMinds.org and from BenjamanSpall.com.

'Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.’

Thomas Alva Edison

‘It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.’

Theodore Roosevelt

‘Defeat doesn’t finish a man–quit does. A man is not finished when he is defeated. He’s finished when he quits.’

Richard Nixon

‘If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down, but the staying down.’

Mary Pickford

 ‘A man should never be ashamed to admit that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.’

Alexander Pope

‘To swear off making mistakes is very easy. All you have to do is swear off having ideas.’

Leo Burnett

‘Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.’

Winston Churchill

‘Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.’

John Dewey

‘The most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by failures.’

Sir Humphry Davy

‘Results! Why man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work.’

Thomas Alva Edison

‘Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.’

Thomas Alva Edison

‘The great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used to failing.’

Albert Schweitzer

‘Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.’

Thomas Alva Edison

‘Failure is not a crime. Failure to learn from failure is.’

Walter Wriston

‘Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.’

Thomas Alva Edison

‘Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.’

Albert Einstein

‘To develop working ideas efficiently, I try to fail as fast as I can.’

Richard P. Feynman

‘Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.’

F. Scott Fitzgerald

‘From error to error one discovers the entire truth.’

Sigmund Freud

‘Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.’

Henry Ford

‘Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.’

Mahatma Gandhi

‘One of the reasons mature people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.’

John W. Gardner

‘A man may fail many times but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.’

J. Paul Getty

‘Success consists of getting up just one more time than you fall.’

Oliver Goldsmith

‘The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.’

Elbert Hubbard

‘An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and how to avoid them.’

Werner Heisenberg

‘If you hit every time, the target is either too big or too near.’

Tom Hirshfield

‘There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose.’

Elbert Hubbard

‘Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly.’

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

‘An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.’

Edwin Land

'My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.'

Abraham Lincoln

'That some achieve great success is proof to all that others can achieve it as well.'

Abraham Lincoln

'The best way to predict your future is to create it.'

Abraham Lincoln

‘An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.’

Isaac Newton

‘Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.’

George S. Patton

‘When I was a young man I observed that nine out of ten things I did were a failure. I didn’t want to be a failure, so I did ten times more work’.

George Bernard Shaw

‘A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing’.

George Bernard Shaw

‘A failure is not always a mistake; it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.

B. F. Skinner

‘It is only through failure and through experiment that we learn and grow.’

Isaac Stern

‘In all science, error precedes the truth, and it is better it should go first than last.’

Hugh Walpole

‘If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.’

Thomas J. Watson, Snr

‘Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.’

Oscar Wilde

‘Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.’

Billy Wilder

Famous failures

• Beethoven’s music teacher once told him that as a composer, he was hopeless.
• Winston Churchill failed the 6th grade.
• John Creasy, the English novelist who wrote 564 books, was rejected 753 times before he became established.
• Charles Darwin’s father told him he would amount to nothing and would be a disgrace to himself and his family.
• Walt Disney was fired by the editor of a newspaper because he, Disney, had "no good ideas".
• When Thomas Edison was a boy his teacher told him he was too stupid to learn anything.
• Einstein was four-years-old before he spoke. He spoke haltingly until nine years of age. He was advised to drop out of High School. And his teachers told him he would never amount to much.
• Henry Ford’s first two automobile businesses failed.
• Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard’s early failed products included a lettuce-picking machine and an electric weight-loss machine.
• Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.
• Ray Krok failed as a real estate salesperson before discovering the McDonald’s idea.
• R.H. Macy failed 7 times before his store in New York caught on.
• Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka sold only 100 of an automatic rice cooker which burned the rice. Later, they built a cheap tape recorder for Japanese schools. This was the foundation of Sony Corp.
• Isaac Newton failed at running the family farm and did poorly in school.
• Babe Ruth struck out 1,330 times (but he also hit 714 home runs).
• Steven Spielberg dropped out of high school in his sophomore year. He was persuaded to come back and placed in a learning disabled class. He lasted a month.
• The artist Whistler failed chemistry, failed at West Point and failed at engineering before turning his hand to art.
• F. W. Woolworth got a job in a dry goods store when he was 21, but his employer would not let him wait on customers because he "didn’t have enough sense."
• The great baseball pitcher Cy Young lost almost as many games as he won.