Beauty, Necessity and Reason for Failure
I keep telling all of you to subscribe and listen to Colin Cowherd for free. Regardless of your interest or disinterest in sports. Even if he is indeed a sports talk show host.
http://sports.espn.go.com/espnradio/show?showId=theherd
Because Colin when he wants to make a point will always make an analogy to life. Like a - this is how it is- example. He just has a gift for making a point. Just listen to the 7 minutes I provided in the attachment section below or here if you are not on multiply.
Thomas Edison went through failure because for him it was learning what DID NOT WORK.
Failure is there for many reasons. Motivation to succeed is one. Motivation to even try. De-motivation to fight the human tendency to coast. We learn from our mistakes. How can we truly learn if they are never identified as mistakes?
You have to go through struggle. As much as I do not want to struggle or be put in positions where there is doubt and pain. That is why I thought of the story I was told about the struggle to get out of the cocoon. You may read it at the bottom of the post.
There was one day in college I thought I was having a particularly bad day. Just one thing after another that could have been better. Back then I drove a Chrysler New Yorker 79. Huge car. My school (www.sfu.ca) was up on a hill ( as in the song Aja) and it was bit of a drive down. Well that night my car choked. It lost all power. Had I been having a normal day maybe I would have panicked at this sudden intrusion of adversity. But at that point I was so besieged that I was calmer. I had no steering, no power brakes and was going too fast down hill to resort to the emergency brake. Looking back on it, I had two things going for me: 1) no traffic ahead of me 2) I was going down the straight path not down the spiral path. I ended up slowing down by switching the transmission to "2" then "1" then the parking brake. Only now, nineteen years later do I appreciate what truly happened. But adversity and struggle helped.
Failure is good if we deserve it. Failure tells us where we are at. We have choices when confronted with failure.
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Off the top of my head from the Tom Hopkins Academy of Champions. ( It's been years since I read it)
- I never see failure as failure but as an opportunity to improve my sense of humor
- I never see failure as failure but only as a learning experience
- I never see failure as failure but a chance to improve my technique and perfect my performance
- I never see failure as failure but a chance to change course in my direction.
- I never see failure as failure because its the game I must play to win.
See how I did:
http://www.tomhopkins.com/April2009Newsletter.html
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I knew of some people ( in college) whose automatic answer to the question what is the score when we were playing sports was "tie". No winners and no losers. What is that? That's Marxism is what it is.
Failure is there for a reason. The cliche says the only way not to fail is not do anything. Anybody who has ever broken ground in anything had to go through failure.
Ed
related links:
http://cornholiogogs.multiply.com/tag/colin%20cowherd
http://cornholiogogs.multiply.com/tag/herd
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,518101,00.html
http://www.tomhopkins.com/April2009Newsletter.html
http://www.gopusa.com/theloft/wp-print-mobile.php?p=1377
http://www.candogo.com/search/insight?i=617
http://www.whisperceo.com/Pages/Motivation/Stories/Cocoon%20Struggle%200001.htm
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Technical note: if you do not see the attachments below click here to go to original post.
http://www.whisperceo.com/Pages/Motivation/Stories/Cocoon%20Struggle%200001.htm
COCOON STRUGGLE (posted 05/10/03)
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A man found a cocoon of a butterfly. One day a small opening appeared. He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force it’s body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could and it could go no farther.
Then the man decided to help the butterfly, so he took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. But it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings.
The man continued to watch the butterfly because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract in time.
Neither happen!!! In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of it’s life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly.
What the man in his kindness and haste did not understand was that the restricting cocoon and the struggles required for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening were nature’s way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into it’s wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved it’s freedom from the cocoon.
Sometimes struggle are exactly what we need in our life. If nature allowed us to go through life without obstacles, it would cripple us. We would not be as strong as what we could have been.
And we could never fly…
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