Allow me to share something that I’m proud of: I’ve been failing all my life and I’m determined to keep on failing for the rest of it.
Now here’s something most people aren’t proud to acknowledge: everybody fails. Even you.
There is not a single human on this planet, nor any that ever lived or will ever exist, that has never failed at anything. Don’t believe me? Consider this…
“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” Michael Jordan
When you were a child, did you walk the first time you tried? Have you ever heard of any babies that could talk as soon as they were born? Do you know anyone who learned to drive without ever having sat in a car before? You get my point. We all have to go through a period of learning and practice before we achieve competency, let alone mastery.
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” Winston Churchill
Malcolm Gladwell points out in two of his best-known books (“Outliers” and “The Tipping Point“) that it takes at least 10,000 hours of practice to achieve excellence in virtually anything. That’s a lot of failure to get past in order to reach success.
Time we got started.
