failure

Failure doesn't define you. It's what you do after you fail that determines whether you are a leader or a waste of perfectly good air.

Remember the two benefits of failure. First, if you do fail, you learn what doesn't work; and second, the failure gives you the opportunity to try a new approach.

Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.

I will be known forever as the Puppy who chased a cutpurse and caught fish garbage instead. My descendants will pretend I'm not in their bloodline. No _ no one will want to make descendants with me. [from Beka Cooper's journal of her first day as a new Dog i.e. cop]

The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.

For every question, there is an answer. Where everybody fails is by asking the wrong question.

Failure? I never encountered it. All I ever met were temporary setbacks.

As the sun shines I will make hayTo keep failure at bayFor there remaineth a payFor my honest toil each day.

And of course, there is always the F for failure. F for failing falling festering failure. F for fault. F for forgotten.

FAILURE IS INEVITABLE. I will fail. We all will. And having failed, and gotten back up, and failed again, taught me that I can survive failure. This is a downfall in most modern stories: the hero always wins. Because while this story is inspiring, it__ also false. In reality, not everyone wins. It__ 100% true that no one wills all the time, and we expect that__very hero must fall at least once. But it__ also 100% true that some people never win at all, and that__ the thing we try so hard to ignore behind the pretty stories. I could spend the rest of my life trying to be a prima ballerina, and it would not happen. I would fail at that for the rest of my life. FAILURE TEACHES US WHO WE ARE. Because even though I know I would fail forever at being a prima ballerina, I also know that I am not someone who should be a prima ballerina. It__ not who I am, it__ not what I want. Of course I would fail at it.

Of course, when you fall out of love, it__ rarely about just one failure or one betrayal, is it? . . . How does it happen? All those things you once loved about each other are replaced by other things that remind you of something you hate until you__e always setting each other off, and what you share is a battleground. In the end, the failure turns out to be less about sex__hich surprises most men__nd more about loss of respect. One morning your partner looks at you across the bed and wonders at the waywardness of her own heart__ow, she asks herself, can she feel such disdain for someone she once felt such love?

The pressure of adversity is the most powerful sustainer of accountability. It's as though everything you do is multiplied by 50 in order to surpass those with a head-start. I was never capable of slacking when at the threshold of failure.

His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in the correct and acceptable fashion.

If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.

At some point, most of us reach a place where we__e afraid to fail, where we instinctively avoid failure and stick only to what is placed in front of us or only what we__e already good at.This confines us and stifles us. We can be truly successful only at something we__e willing to fail at. If we__e unwilling to fail, then we__e unwilling to succeed.

The fear of getting knocked down is less about the pain of the fall and more about the embarrassment in having fallen. And so, to rid myself of the latter is to reduce my concern about the former, which means I just unleashed my life.

If the Gospels were truly the pattern of God__ activity, then defeat was only the beginning.