Today's quotation:

You must accept that you might fail; then, if you do your best and still don’t win, at least you can be satisfied that you’ve tried.  If you don’t accept failure as a possibility, you don’t set high goals, you don’t branch out, you don’t try— you don’t take the risk.

Rosalynn Carter

Today's Meditation:

Nothing in this world is a given.  Even though there are many things that we can predict with a high degree of accuracy, there are many more things that we'll be wrong about.  Every year thousands of small businesses start and fail within a short amount of time.  Athletes aren't chosen in drafts or are cut from teams because they're not quite good enough.  Relationships end, banks foreclose on houses, movies and records and books are released just to do horrible business.

We all have the potential to fail, and there's nothing wrong with that.  But when we don't recognize the possibility of failure and neglect to plan for that potential, we may just leave ourselves hanging out in the wind without any sort of protection at all.  If we don't acknowledge the fact that we may fail, we may set our sights a bit lower than we otherwise would, or we may not work as hard to make something work because we assume success and therefore don't feel the need to do the necessary work to succeed.

Life isn't about winning-- it's about trying and learning from the effort.  Many people win medals in the Olympic games, but many more go home without gold, silver, or bronze.  But their goals have brought them to the possibility of at least competing in the Olympic Games, putting them among the very elite athletes in the world.  When they get there and they try their best, well, isn't that enough?  They've taken many risks to get where they are, always knowing in the back of their minds that they might not get there.  They've done their best, win or lose, and that's what matters.

For further thought:

Failure is a reality; we all fail at times and it’s painful when we do.  But it’s better to fail while striving for something wonderful, challenging, adventurous and uncertain than to say, “I don’t want to try, because I may not succeed completely.”

Jimmy Carter

more thoughts and ideas on failure

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