“The difference between failure and success is doing a thing nearly right and doing a thing exactly right.”
The insightful words penned by Edward Simmons came to my mind while I was reading an article authored by Larry Dorman, which was published in The New York Times. The incident took place in 1996. It was during this time that millions of viewers witnessed Greg Norman squander a significant lead in the Masters golf tournament, ultimately losing to Nick Faldo.
Following this unfortunate event, Norman remarked that he experienced “the most touching few days” of his life. Individuals from around the globe reached out to him with messages of support. He received four times the amount of correspondence compared to when he triumphed at the British Open three years prior.
“It changed my total outlook on life and on people,” Norman said of his defeat. “There’s no need for me to be cynical anymore. My wife said to me, ‘You know, maybe this is better than winning the green jacket (given to those who win the Masters golf tournament). Maybe now you understand the importance of it all.’”
Norman never thought he could reach out and touch people like that. And the extraordinary thing is that he did it by losing.
How true indeed were the words of the late American president Richard M. Nixon, who was impeached due to the Watergate scandal. “Success is not a harbor but a voyage with its own perils to the spirit,” he said. “The game of life is to come up with a winner, to be a success, or to achieve what we set out to do.
“Yet,” he continued, “there is always the danger of failing as a human being. The lesson that most of us on this voyage never learn, but can never quite forget, is that to win is sometimes to lose.”
Ideas about failures abound. Emmett LeCompte contends, “He who has never failed has never tried.” W.A. Nance states, “Failures can be divided into those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.”
Charles Kettering admonishes, “You fail because your ideas aren’t right. You should be afraid to fail, but you should learn to fail intelligently. But that I mean, when you fail, find out why you failed, and each time you fail it will bring you up nearer to the goal.”
The world is replete with stories of men and women who thought they were failures but became successful anyway. Isaac Newton did very poorly in grade school. Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor for lack of ideas. Henry Ford failed and went broke five times before he finally succeeded.
In some instances, parents are discouraged instead of inspiring their children to become successful. “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat catching,” the father told his son, Charles Darwin, when the latter gave up his medical career.
However, this did not prevent Darwin from establishing himself as the progenitor of the Theory of Evolution. In his autobiography, Darwin stated, “I was regarded by everyone, including my master and my father, as a rather ordinary boy, somewhat below the average in intellect.”
Teachers provided no assistance whatsoever. Ludwig van Beethoven struggled with the violin and favored performing his own compositions over refining his technique. His instructor deemed him a hopeless case as a composer.
Albert Einstein did not utter a word until he reached the age of four and did not begin reading until he was seven. His teacher characterized him as “mentally slow, unsociable, and perpetually lost in his foolish dreams.” He was expelled and denied entry to the Zurich Polytechnic School.
Often, those referred to as “experts” can be entirely mistaken. “Cannot perform! Slightly balding! Can dance somewhat,” stated the memo from the MGM testing director regarding the initial screen test of the dancing phenomenon Fred Astaire.
Richard Bach’s 10,000-word narrative about a “soaring” seagull, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, faced rejection from eighteen publishers before Macmillan eventually published it in 1970. By 1975, it had sold over seven million copies in the United States alone.
Richard Hooker dedicated seven years to crafting his comedic war novel, M*A*S*H, only to have it rejected by 21 publishers before Morrow chose to publish it. It went on to become a massive bestseller, leading to a blockbuster film and a highly successful television series.
All these “failures” have one thing in common though: they didn’t quit. An unknown poet says it well: “When things go wrong as they sometimes will, when the road you’re trudging seems all uphill, when the funds are low and the debts are high, and you want to smile, but you have to sigh.
“Rest if you must, but don’t you quit,” the poet continues. “Life is queer with its twists and turns, as every one of us sometimes learns, and many a failure turns about when he might have won had he stuck it out.”
Some people, however, can dismiss failures humorously. Comedian actor W.C. Fields once said: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no use being a damn fool about it.”
Finally, here’s a thought-provoking statement from William A. Ward: “From failure can come valuable experience; from experience – wisdom; from wisdom – mutual trust; from mutual trust – cooperation; from cooperation – united effort; from united effort – success.”
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