Ray Meyer, basketball coach for DePaul for 42 years, had 42 consecutive winning seasons before he retired a few years ago. One season his team had a 29-game winning streak at the home court; then they lost a game. Reporters were anxious to get in the locker room to interview Meyer to ask him about that loss and to see how it affected him. He was all smiles; he said, “This is great. For the last ten, Twelve days we’ve been thinking about the winning streak. We’ve been trying not to lose, every game. Now that we’ve ...
Ray Meyer, basketball coach for DePaul for 42 years, had 42 consecutive winning seasons before he retired a few years ago. One season his team had a 29-game winning streak at the home court; then they lost a game. Reporters were anxious to get in the locker room to interview Meyer to ask him about that loss and to see how it affected him. He was all smiles; he said, “This is great. For the last ten, Twelve days we’ve been thinking about the winning streak. We’ve been trying not to lose, every game. Now that we’ve lost a game, we can go back to concentrating on winning.” Those who concentrate on failure program themselves to fail.
Walking from the American Dream
Author: Donald W. McCullough
Thus we must learn to fail well. Strange as it may sound, you can fail at failing or you can succeed at failing. Thomas Watson was once asked the secret of his success in bringing IBM to its leadership in the computer industry. Watson replied, “I have learned how to fail forward!” that’s the secret of failing well.
I truly believe there is a small difference between failure and mistakes. So you pour your heart, soul and savings into a business. You know this business inside out, you have done your homework, you have worked your tail off, you have sacrificed and given everything and it goes belly up. You lose everything. Did you fail? My opinion… no you had a loss.
Whereas if you go into a business and are lazy, make poor choices, hire bad people, have sloppy business practices etc… you are building a pile of small failures that will lead to one massive failure.
Who is a bigger failure… they guy who can’t read or the guy who can but reads trash all day long. I would say that guy is far off worse than the guy who can’t read. Failure is a difficult subject to quantify… because even people who seemingly succeed are many times failures in other areas of their lives… and many times every other area of their life. There is a history of rock stars who were successful in music, but not money, relationships, health, family, business etc…
Look when it comes to failure, be easy on yourself. Everyone fails… if not then they aren’t trying… and again they are truly the failure not you.
Psalm 119:71 It was good for me to be afflicted so that I could learn Your statutes
Afflicted: humbly misled. I made mistakes but learned from it.
The Psalmist says humbly - I made mistakes, I failed, but I learned more about your boundaries, conditions and rules.
I love failure… because usually some of my favorite stories come from it. And a lot of humor as well.
But mostly I love failure because each one is a stepping stone to success.
