Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control. They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.
What people often ask me is, ‘What are the ingredients of Silicon Valley?’ While the answer to that is complex, some of the ingredients I talk about are celebrating entrepreneurship, accepting failure, and embracing a mobile and diverse workforce.
If you want to become physically stronger, you’ll need healthy habits – like going to the gym. You’ll also have to give up unhealthy habits – like eating junk food. Building mental strength requires healthy habits – like practicing gratitude – while also giving up unhealthy behavior, like giving up after the first failure.
If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices.
Over the years, I learned that in my career, unlike in life, sometimes my wheelchair is its own automatic door opener. I was able to win the OWN competition by applying one simple principle: be funny, and admit you suck before anyone else can call you out on it. In other words, make the narrative of your failure a comedy.
Is there any possibility of giving international air travel, which we all need and use and hate, a touch of glamour, or even of reliable, soulless efficiency? I suspect future historians will puzzle over our failure. But by then, of course, we shall be in the age of mass space travel, with its fresh and unimaginable crop of horrors.
The most effective leaders are actually better at guarding against danger when they acknowledge it that it exists. Cowards, in contrast, cling to the hope that failure will never happen and may be sloppy in the face of danger – not because they don’t acknowledge that it exists, but because they are just too afraid of it to look it in the eye.
Failure is ultimately very liberating. Once you come out the other side of it, you just might have faced one of your biggest fears and lived. The other side of failure is a big elimination of fear of failure. Trust me, that is an amazing gift.
What is more comforting to the terrorists around the world: the failure to pass the 9/11 legislation because we lacked a majority of the majority,’ or putting aside partisan politics to enact tough new legislation with America’s security foremost in mind?
The power of fear of failure, with will to win, is an incredible force. I don’t think we should be worried about having a fear of failure; I think it’s quite natural. If you surveyed any top businessman or any top athlete, I bet if they were truthful, they would all say they’ve got a fear of losing and a fear of failure.
The consequences for failure are very different if you’re a woman or a person of color than they are if you’re a guy. If you’re a guy who makes a mistake, you get a second chance. Often, for those of us who are outsiders, we make a mistake, and that’s the end of the conversation.
Since the global financial crisis and recession of 2007-2009, criticism of the economics profession has intensified. The failure of all but a few professional economists to forecast the episode – the aftereffects of which still linger – has led many to question whether the economics profession contributes anything significant to society.
During my sojourn in ironclad atheism, the primary arsenal leveled against Christianity had been its failure on empirical grounds. Surely, enlightened reason offered a more coherent cosmos. Surely, Occam’s razor cut the faithful free from blind faith. There is no proof of God; therefore, it is unreasonable to believe in God.
Perfectionist is sometimes the wrong word… It means like you’re never satisfied, or you’re upset by every single failure – any type of failure. And so for me, I don’t look at failure as necessarily a bad thing as long as I’m able to learn from it and take something from it, so that next time I’m in that situation I know how to succeed.
Risk management systems and controls may discourage or limit certain revenue-generating opportunities. Failure to ensure the independence of these functions from the revenue generators and risk takers has been shown to be dangerous, and this is something for which the board is accountable.
Working hard to fulfill a dream or instinct and learning over time it doesn’t work, doesn’t mean a career is over and a reputation killed. When a reputation is killed, it’s when failure comes as a result of loss of integrity or judgement… breaking of laws.
I failed the LSAT. Basically, if I had not failed, I’d have been a lawyer and there would be no Spanx. I think failure is nothing more than life’s way of nudging you that you are off course. My attitude to failure is not attached to outcome, but in not trying. It is liberating.
It’s true that if it’s always going to be that if you win the World Cup or European Championship, you’re a success, and if you don’t, you’re a failure, then you’re bedding yourself for a lack of success because there aren’t many coaches who have won those things, and there are thousands who haven’t.
I find fault with my children because I like them and I want them to go places – uprightness and strength and courage and civil respect and anything that affects the probabilities of failure on the part of those that are closest to me, that concerns me – I find fault.
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer, decentralized form of money, as durable as the Internet itself. Remember, the Internet – or DARPA, as it was originally called – was created as a fail-safe, global network with no ‘single point of failure.’ If one part goes down, data takes another route, and nothing is lost.
The truth is when you have a movie that was as successful as ‘Chronicle’ was, it’s not as quick of a process. There are a lot more voices coming in and saying ‘This is what the sequel should be’ because there’s a bigger expectation and a bigger fear of failure. And that’s really what’s going on with ‘Chronicle 2.’
If your goal is to lose 10 pounds, you may wake up each day with failure in mind because the goal is hard to reach, and you are progressing only by small amounts. It takes up all your willpower. I recommend that instead of a goal, you have a system.
As an entrepreneur, I’ve come across countless articles and quotes proudly telling me that I should accept failure, smile, and keep my head up. In other words, I’ve been told to stay positive. The thing is, when you’re forced to shut down a business and let really awesome people you care about go, staying positive is the last thing on your mind.
The failure of national economic policy is costing us more than jobs; it has begun to weaken that uniquely American spirit of risk-taking, large ambition, and optimism about the future. We must rally them now to bold departures that rebuild our national morale as well as our material prosperity.
When you say ‘failure,’ that seems really dramatic, but a lot of failure is just really depressing and mundane. I remember the first time I ever played a concert in Italy. I played a venue that held 900 people, and I think five people showed up. It wasn’t a big, ‘John Carter of Mars’ type failure. It wasn’t dramatic; it was just depressing.
