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Today's
Quotation:
Virtually
nothing comes out right the first time. Failures, repeated failures,
are finger posts on the road to achievement. The only time you don't
want to fail is the last time you try something. . . . one fails forward
toward success.
Charles F. Kettering
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Today's
Meditation:
Wayne
Dyer says that if you try something and it doesn't come out
right, then you haven't failed-- you've just created an
outcome. Perhaps the outcome isn't exactly the one
that you had hoped to create, but what of that? It's
not such a big deal, is it? The fact is that our
attempts that result in outcomes that we hadn't intended are
some of the greatest learning experiences that we possibly
can have.
I'm
always uncomfortable with our ideas of "success"
being to make exact copies of what other people do.
When I sing along with songs, I often throw in my own lyrics
or sing their lyrics at different times than the singers
do. People I know have a hard time with this, and
consider me to have "failed" because I wasn't
singing along exactly-- they think I've forgotten the lyrics
or something.
But
some of our "failures" can lead to new discoveries
that are our own achievements. Perhaps your chocolate
chip cookies aren't exactly like your mother's, but with
some experimentation, they can become uniquely yours.
The danger with getting them right the first time would be
that you stop experimenting because you already know how to
do it "right."
We
have to give ourselves a chance. I grew up with a fear
of failure because I always thought that people would judge
me harshly if I failed at something. If I did fail, I
wouldn't ever admit it. I'm over that now, and I know
now that everything I do will go through several different
variations before it comes out right. That's why poems
and novels and stories are revised-- they may be pretty good
after the first draft, but that's just the core of the
expression-- the art comes with the revision, with the second
and third and fourth tries.
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