Failure: Never Forever

It is well known that for 28 years Abraham Lincoln experienced one failure after another. In 1833 he had a nervous breakdown. When he ran for speaker in 1838 he was defeated. In 1848 he lost re-nomination to Congress and was rehjected for land officer in 1849. These failures did not stop him from battling on. In 1854 he was defeated for the Senate. Two years later he lost the nomination for cice president and was again defeated for the Senate in 1858. Yet despite it all, in 1860 he was elected president and went down history as one of America's greatest president.

Obviously, success isn't the absence of failure. It is having the determination to never quit because "quitters never win and winners never quit".

Almost every person who has achieved anything worthwhile with his or her life has not only experienced failure but experienced it many times. Lincoln experienced innumerable failures, but he was never a failure because he never gave in.

Walt disney was the same. He went broke several times and had a nervous breakdown before he became successful.

Enrico Caruso failed so many times with his high notes that his voice teacher advised him to give up. He didn"t. Instead he persevered and became one of the world's greatest tenors.

Albert eeinstein and Werner von Braun failed courses in math. Henry Ford was broke when he was 40. Thomas Edison's school teacher called him a dunce, and later he failed over 6,000 times before he perfected the first electric bulb.

No matter how badly or how many times a person fails. he is never a failure providing he gets up just one more time than he falls down. Furthermore, like a high jumper, one never discovers his full potential until he reaches his point of failure. As one peerson said, "low aim, not failure, is crime." Remember, too that failure is an event, not a person.

It is actually the fear of failure, not failure itself, that crippes people. As Baudjuin once said, "No matter how hard you work for success, if your thought is saturated with fear of failure, it will kill your efforts, neutralize your endeavour, and make success impossible."

Rather than having no goal, it is, as it has been wisely said, "far better tto dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered with failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."