3 posts tagged “failure”

Failing is one of those things we hate in life.  Its also one of those things that make the best teachers for life.  This is a conundrum.  If you go through life trying to avoid pain you wind up avoiding the best life has to offer.  It is only through the experience of failure that you learn the value of success and in general unless you are willing to try, and try again you will be entirely reliant on the success and benevolence of others.  While a certain amount of wisdom is required to make use of the lessons failure has to teach us, this sort of wisdom is not a rare commodity.  You are capable of succeeding, just don't expect to be successful on the first attempt.  Its a very rare talent in any one skill that can be successful with the first attempt more often than not. 

Edward de Bono:

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

Elbert Hubbard:

A failure is a man who has blundered but is not capable of cashing in on the experience.

Oscar Wilde:

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

Robert F. Kennedy:

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.

Thomas Alva Edison:

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

Thomas Alva Edison:

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

Wallace Stegner:

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

William M. Winans:

Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down.

Winston Churchill:

Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.

Failures are constituted in one of three ways.  1. Never trying.  The main reason most people fail is due to never starting.  Whether for fear or laziness or lack of incentive and most notably, lack of a vision.  2.  Trying once or 10,000 times and giving up never to try it again.  Whether for frustration or switching priorities, quitting is certain failure.  3.  This is the least of the reasons though it would seem counterintuitive.  Most things we do today were once impossible until somebody followed a vision to see it through.  However, there are a few things that we either don't have the technological advancement to get it done or what we've envisioned flies in the face of physics and really is impossible.  First priority toward a goal is vision.  If you can't envision the goal, your goal will keep moving back so that you never acheive the goal and never realize success.

Requirements for success are 1 learn everything you can about your goal or vision.  2 start.  3. learn from the failures 4 keep trying.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Takes-Village-Hillary-Rodham-Clinton/dp/0684825457

Hillary Clinton wrote a book a decade ago called, "It Takes a Village."  The premise is that parents cannot be held solely responsible for the upbringing of their children.  This much is true and I agree wholeheartedly that teenagers especially, but children in general must be held accountable for their behavior by whoever catches them in their unacceptable behavior on the spot.  I take this very seriously and act personally on this principal.  Funny enough, I saw an example in a Hollywood movie called 'Second Hand Lions' that cemented this principal in me.

A few weeks ago I was driving through a nice neighborhood on a very quiet street in the middle of the day when something thumped against my vehicle.  I quickly checked my rearview mirror and saw a nerf football bouncing around on the pavement.  Looking around, there wasn't a soul in sight.  I still hadn't come to a complete stop so I immediately decided to keep going.  Before I'd traveled 6 houses along the street I thought better of it and decided to pull over where the street curved and watch what happened where the ball rested.  It didn't take but a minute or two and there they were, about five pre-teen boys creeping out into the street to retrieve their ball.  They didn't hang around to continue their play but slipped back behind the backyard fences to wait for another car to come along.  Sure enough, the next car had the ball bouncing off the side of it as it passed the house.

I turned around and headed back down to the house and they saw me and broke in three different directions.  When I got there and stepped out they were well out of sight.  Rather than call the police and make a much bigger deal of it than it had to be, I called out to them that I wanted to talk to them.... no answer.  I waited a few seconds them said, "You can talk to me or you can talk to the police!"  That did it.  Three of them came out to face my wrath rather than have names recorded, addresses noted for trouble makers and parents ire lit to the heavens.  At first they tried to deny they'd done anything, then tried to claim it was an accident, but I wasn't having any excuses.  I described who and what I saw in as clear detail as I could muster then proceeded to chew them up one side and down the other about endangering drivers, about common courtesy, and about their use of time.  If I were involved in any sort of youth activities, I would have talked to their parents about involving them in my program.  As it was, I let the scare of my anger and the 'could have been' consequences ride their reasoning abilities.  The worse they can imagine and the less you explain what those consequences might be, the better.  I didn't have to press charges, I didn't have to hit anybody, and I didn't have to press their parents to "do something."  All I had to do was express my intolerance of their abusive behavior, but it has to be done on the spot, when it happens.  This is love, not ignoring them, and not pressing the advantage because you're in the right.

Another time, some teens had taken somebody else's wheeled trash can and drug it along the street beside their speeding vehicle to slam it into my garbage cans.  These kids were videoing their handy work to post it on the web.  They were finding glory in their mis-behavior. (following the influence of the movie 'Jackass' no doubt.)  This is far worse behavior for society and is the same mindset that has lone gunmen walking into schools to shoot kids and faculty en masse so their story will be plastered all over national and international news.  This is where you call the police and prosecute to the fullest extent of the law.  Judges and defenders are wrong to write this off as 'just kids' stuff' when they are glorifying it on YouTube.  This too, is love.  Measuring your response based on what is best for all of society, those who would harm it, what would correct it.  Not assuming they will get their due, not allowing glory to Jackass copycats, and not chasing them down with a baseball bat to damage their property, (car) in retaliation for damaging your property. 

Back to Hillary's book, she doesn't want to just uphold the common decency standards we can all agree on.  She is talking about state run programs expanding educational and Child Protective Services' authority and using it to enforce her standards on our children and their parents.  If you don't find that scary, consider the results of every government run social program to come out of Washington.  What has welfare done to the biggest recipient group, inner city blacks?  What has Social Security, whose funds were stolen by the welfare program, done to retirement planning and the social responsibility we must have for our own futures?  What has federally funded education and it's requirements done for our kids' ranking in the world?  What has price regulation done for fuel supply? (repealed within one year due to shortages in the 1970's)  I could go on, but I'd only be repeating myself from earlier articles on this blog.  Imagine if you will, the parenting police ensuring you are teaching your children according to state proclaimed standards or worse, keeping your kids in various after school programs to give you less access to them.  That was Hillary's vision in the book, but stated in softer tones and covered over with examples of the inevitable atrocities committed by so few parents against their own children in relation to the norm.

Add to this authority the propensity of groups like the Lesbian/Gay/Trans-sexual Lobby foisting their agendas upon parents under the threat of removing the children from your home and incarcerating you if you refuse.  Last week, a three judge panel in the Los Angeles area gave a ruling effectively dissolving all California parents' option of home schooling unless they can become accredited teachers.  This in the face of the fact that home schooled kids consistently rank at the top of 4th and 8th grades according to a government sponsored study and are preferred recruits for college.  Hillary's agenda is dangerous and there are plenty of co-conspirators within our courts, within our Federal and Local Government, and among the lobbyists.

Accounts of current indoctrination:

This is an article in World Net Daily about Anita Bryant.  Anita's story is about the sacrifice necessary to combat lies like these and the moral fortitude required to stand in the gap.  http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=58600