This week’s blog post is originally from The Flute View founder and author Barbara Siesel. Interesting thoughts!
If you’ve never failed you’ve never tried anything new!
Last month we spoke about the power of quitting, this month we’ll speak about the power of failure to inform our progress as artists and entrepreneurs. While doing research for this article I’ve been reading about famous people who’ve failed numerous times, their failures are as great as their successes! Large failures and large successes.
Let’s look at some quotes from some people who’ve achieved great success and along the way great failure as well. Here are a few of my favorite quotes about failure:
“It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” Bill Gates
“Success is failure in progress.” Albert Einstein
“My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with you failure.” Abraham Lincoln
“I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” Michael Jordan
“…we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” Walt Disney
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently”. Henry Ford
Each of these people experienced great failures before their successes. For example, Einstein didn’t speak until he was 4 years old and didn’t read until he was 7. His grades were so poor in school that a teacher told him “you will never amount to anything”. Abraham Lincoln had almost 30 years of failure before he was elected president in 1860, including being defeated for the US Senate(twice), defeated for the nomination for Vice-President, a failed business and much more. Michael Jordan was cut from his sophomore year HS Varsity basketball team!!
What do all these people and quotes have in common- what do they tell us about failure? I love the idea of failure as being an opportunity to begin again, to not be content with your failure, that success is failure in progress, that failing a lot is why we succeed! Most of us have a fear of failure, but maybe, just maybe, failure is one of the ways that we accomplish success. What we learn, what we risk, and the deep understanding of the world that can come from experiencing failure are what makes us more open, more compassionate and more able to withstand the difficulties inherent in our artistic and entrepreneurial endeavors. So on the day that you reach rock bottom, the day that you lose that audition, your new business fails, your entrepreneurial idea is laughed out of the investor meeting, your 100 grant proposals of your new flutrepreneur endeavor are turned down, think— this failure is the beginning of my success! Think, “I welcome this failure because now I know I’m going to succeed!”