failure

"There can be no freedom without freedom to fail."
Eric Hoffer

Failure as a Way of Life

"The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don't seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions. No doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make." - Matthew B. Crawford

"Do not be discouraged by anything you would call a failure. Discouragement is a trick of the ego that seeks immediate results. It is the ego insisting on a perfection that does not exist. Leave perfection to God." - Vincent Cole

Failure can knock self-worth surprisingly early

Fail is defined as:

To be unsuccessful.

To judge unacceptable.

To cease functioning properly.

To fall short in what is expected.

To become bankrupt or insolvent.

To decline, as in strength or effectiveness.

To prove insufficient in quantity or duration; give out.

To disappoint, prove undependable, to abandon or forsake.

To receive an academic grade below the acceptable minimum.

To prove deficient or lacking; perform ineffectively or inadequately.

To give way or be made otherwise useless as a result of excessive strain.

"A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks." - George Orwell

The ultimate taboo - failure!

Any fool can win, it's losing that's the challenge.

Moreover, there's a lot to be said for failure.

It is so much more interesting than success. Success goes to the head, but losing goes to the heart.

After all, who among us has never lost in a job, in a relationship, on the tennis court?

Losing is part of the price of life .

It is the human condition, all of us born to sorrow.

Born losers.

It begins early. Little League, science fairs, spelling bees.

Later there are pink slips, unrequited compassion and, finally death.

Losing is a necessary part of competing;

For every winner, there is at least one, and usually many more, losers.

Losing is one of life's constant companions, ever unwelcome, ever there.

The Rolling Stones had it right you can't always get what you want.

Nevertheless, losing is a taboo in American society.

The ultimate put down is "loser," and failure is the ultimate f-word.

Hundreds of books have been written on how to win; there are scarcely any on how to lose.

We forget that losers changed the world.

Columbus missed his target by thousands of miles.

Thomas Edison had most of his inventing triumphs before the age of 40, and in his later years he rolled up an ever increasing number of failures.

Mozart died impoverished and was buried in the pauper's section of the cemetery.

Most of the first edition of "Walden" remained in Henry David Thoreau's personal library.

Winston Churchill distracted himself from defeat with painting, writing, gardening and breeding butterflies.

Winner worship is embedded early.

Children returning from games are asked whether they won or lost, when they should be asked whether they had fun, or asked nothing at all.

Parents often play games with their children and allow them to win, ill preparing them for the 'game' of life.

Some educators feel that flunking a class is so detrimental to self-respect that they move children along to the next grade and to bigger failures to come.

Nowhere is winner worship and loser loathing more evident than in sports or in that other great arena: politics.

Few losers suffer more acutely than defeat candidates. Jimmy Carter was stunned by his land-slide 1980 loss to Ronald Reagan, and for about five years he all but vanished from the national political scene. He took no part in the 1984 presidential campaign - even though his former vice president, Walter Mondale, was running against Ronald Reagan.

We could pay a terrible price for our loser-loathing.

We are a country founded by humans who faced down death to start anew, but we could be reduced to wimphood.

What better way to avoid losing than to never enter the fray?

Americans still revere the images of the lone cowboy, riding off into the sunset in search of his destiny.

But how many of us are timid couch potatoes, spectators at the game of life, content to see the spotlight on the winning team, to forget about the other side of every zero sum transaction?

Americans need to confront their losers and their losses.

Something as universal as failure deserves our attention.

It has its positive side.

For one thing, you're among the super majority.

Winning isn't always worth its weight in blue ribbons, and losing can be positive and enabling if it compels us to examine why we lost.

After all, it is the way we learn and the way we live.

William Ecenbarger , Pulitzer Prize winning author

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This website defines a new perspective with which to engage reality to which its author adheres. The author feels that the falsification of reality outside personal experience has forged a populace unable to discern propaganda from reality and that this has been done purposefully by an international corporate cartel through their agents who wish to foist a corrupt version of reality on the human race. Religious intolerance occurs when any group refuses to tolerate religious practices, religious beliefs or persons due to their religious ideology. This web site marks the founding of a system of philosophy named The Truth of the Way of Life - a rational religion based on reason which requires no leap of faith, accepts no tithes, has no supreme leader, no church buildings and in which each and every individual is encouraged to develop a personal relation with the Creator and Sustainer through the pursuit of the knowledge of reality in the hope of curing the spiritual corruption that has enveloped the human spirit. The tenets of The Truth of the Way of Life are spelled out in detail on this web site by the author. Violent acts against individuals due to their religious beliefs in America is considered a "hate crime."

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