“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” – Thomas A. Edison
I considered this friend as one of those that will be most likely to succeed. He was a good television reporter and his reports were engaging, news worthy, and novel. Each time I watched his live telecast, I often said to myself he could be one of the most valuable TV journalists to be discovered.
But his TV network didn’t think so. After three years, he was tired of not getting anywhere. He pictured himself as just one of those guys who can never be successful in-front of the camera. “I have decided,” he wrote in a text message. “I will quit my job.”
He did resign from his job and I don’t know where he is now. He has never communicated with me anymore. I forgot to tell him the words of Robert Strauss. “Success,” he said, “is a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don’t quit when you’re tired – you quit when the gorilla is tired.”
Most successful people do that. When conditions become difficult, they keep working. They know that trying times are no time to quit trying. For the thousands of people who give up, there is always someone like Thomas Alva Edison, who said, “I start the last man left off.”
Charles F. Kettering advises, “Keep on going, and the chances are that you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I never heard of anyone ever stumbling on something sitting down.”
That’s what they call perseverance. Just because you think you are not a person with high caliber talent, you can never be famous. “People of mediocre ability sometimes achieve outstanding success because they don’t know when to quit. Most men succeed because they are determined to,” said George Allen.
From the past, we remember William Cullen Bryant, who rewrote Thanatopsis a hundred times. Edward Gibbon rewrote his Autobiography nine times. Plato wrote the first sentence of his Republic nine times. Virgil spent 12 years writing his Aeneid.
“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence,” Calvin Coolidge pointed out. “Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”
Success knows no handicap through physical ills. Lord Byron had a club foot. Manuel L. Quezon, Robert Louis Stevenson and John Keats had tuberculosis. Charles Steinmetz and Alexander Pope were hunchbacks. Rex Harrison and Horatio Nelson had only one eye. Edgar Allan Poe was a mental case. Charles Darwin was an invalid. Julius Caesar was an epileptic. Thomas Edison and Ludwig Beethoven were deaf. Peter Stuyvesant had a wooden leg.
Some successful businesses started as failures. In its first year, Coca-Cola sold only 400 Cokes. Also, in his first year in the automobile business, Henry Ford went bankrupt. Two years later, his second company also failed.
“If you want to get somewhere you have to know where you want to go and how to get there. Then never, never, never give up,” American inspirational speaker Norman Vincent Peale urged.
Don’t picture yourself a failure if in the beginning you don’t go too far. Basketball superstar Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.
Sometimes, life is a series of failures before success arrives. Richard Bach completed only one year of college, then trained to become an Air Force jet-fighter pilot. Twenty months after earning his wings, he resigned. Then he became an editor of an aviation magazine that went bankrupt.
Life became one failure after another. Even when he wrote Jonathan Livingston Seagull, he couldn’t think of an ending. The manuscript lay dormant for eight years before he decided to finish it – only to have 18 publishers reject it. However, once it was published, the book went on to sell 7 million copies in numerous languages and make Bach an internationally known and respected author.
Rejections are nothing new to successful authors. In 1902, the poetry editor of the Atlantic Monthly returned the poems of a 28-year-old poet with the following note: “Our magazine has no room for your vigorous verse.” The poet was Robert Frost.
Three years earlier, Rudyard Kipling received the following rejection letter from the San Francisco Examiner: “I’m sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.”
“Failure doesn’t mean you are a failure,” commented Robert Schuller, “it just means you haven’t succeeded yet.” And Kenneth Boulding reminded, “Nothing fails like success because we don’t learn from it. We learn only from failure.”
Failure is one of the two hardest things to handle in life. The other is success. Look at what happened to Judy Garland and Elvis Presley, two of the most successful singers the world has ever known but they ended their lives in a tragic manner. Which is why Elbert Hubbard urged: “Pray that success will not come any faster than you are able to endure it.”
Finally, here’s a timely thought from Robert Louis Stevenson: “That man is successful who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much, who has gained the respect of the intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it; who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had.” –
