Excerpt from Better Than Good by Zig Ziglar
Failure is one of life’s greatest teachers as long as we are
not crushed by it—as long as we learn from it. I like to divide the world into
two camps: learners and nonlearners. When the learners do something that is not
wise, and failure is the result, they don’t do it again. They learn the lesson.
And when they do something that works, they take note and try to repeat it. In
other word, they don’t treat life like a tunnel—a tube that never gets
narrower. They treat life like they’re heading into a funnel. As they exclude
choices and actions that don’t work, they are continually narrowing the range
of options: they’re throwing out the stupid and keeping the stupendous. Eventually
they hit their stride as peak performers because they don’t do stuff that doesn’t
work.
The real
question in life is not whether you are a success of a failure but whether you
are a learner or a nonlearner.
Here
are some of the best lessons to learn from failure:
- Failure teaches us to depend on God.
- Failure teaches us humility.
- Failure teaches us that we can’t always get what we want.
- Failure teaches us to make a correction in our course of action.
- Failure teaches us character.
- Failure teaches us perseverance.
- Failure teaches us that we can survive.
Failure is a willing teacher; as master
tutor. Anyone willing to sit at the feet of failure and soak up everything
there is to learn will graduate quickly to the school of peak performance.
Eric Hoffer; who wrote widely on the
subject of self-esteem, said, “In times of change the learners inherit the
earth while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a
world that no longer exists.” And speaker Steve Brown has said that anything
worth doing is worth doing poorly—until you can learn to do it well.
