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fail
fails
failed
failure
"There can be no freedom without freedom to fail."
Eric Hoffer 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
love 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" was remaindered into 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 image 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.
Some
thing 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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