I wanna thank everyone who ever told me no, Pack it up and get back home, It kept me going knowin' I would prove them wrong. Yea I knew it all along, Without 'm I might have given up a long time ago, and so, I wanna thank everyone who ever told me no.Buddy Jewell
Because we live in Nashville, I am often reminded of how much failure goes into creating success. From the outside, it seems that music stars just suddenly appear on the scene. The truth is that for most of them it took years of hard work and many, many failures to finally find success.
The same is true for entrepreneurs. Most highly successful entrepreneurs will tell you that along the road to success in their businesses they were often on the brink of failure. But they persevered. They found a way to make payroll. They found a way to make that critical sale. They found a way to keep the wolves away from the door just long enough to make it through the tough times. They found a way to pick themselves up from a business that did not succeed and move on to the next one that might. As Thomas Edison once said, "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."
Our culture seems to be drifting into an alarming view of success and failure. We seek quick or even instant success. I see it in entrepreneurs who look at their businesses as deals to yield a quick, short-term windfall rather than as a sustainable source of income and good jobs. We seek our fortunes through lotteries and lawsuits rather than hard work.
We also try to protect ourselves from any adversity or failure. There are the "helicopter" parents who hover over their offspring trying to shield them from any chance of failure, even as these children become young adults. We have politicians who have created the illusion that government is there to protect us from any harm and to rescue us from all adversity. America has become a society of people who blame everyone and everything else for our own failures.
We seem to have forgotten that failure, in fact, builds character. And it is the fear of failure that inhibits creativity and keeps us from learning.
Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.John Keats
You will fail. Failure is a prerequisite for success.
