A Lesson In Failure
On the road to achievement, welcome the stumbles along your way.
I love this quote. Unfortunately, it is wrongly attributed to one of my favorite authors, C. S. Lewis.
It is also often taken out of context and missing a pivotal sentence. Austin writer and artist Austin Kleon touches on this phenomenon in his blog post, Better In Context. Making reference to memes with hallmark statements, he notes:
“I often look up the original context for the quote and find the quote is either: a) fake b) wrongly attributed c) sliced up to make it more palatable. Worst of all, the meme is very rarely as funny or interesting as the original context.”
The quote above is actually attributed to inventor Charles Kettering, and to Kleon’s point, a key point was removed between the two sentences in the above meme.
“The only time you don’t fail is the last time you try something, and it works.”
That makes a difference, don’t you think?
Lewis was quite familiar with failing, both as a poet and even as a professional speaker. Cases of this and other failings are well-documented throughout many of his written letters.
He also offered encouragement to others in the face of failure. For example, in a letter to his grandson Laurence Harwood, as pointed out in the book The Misquotable C. S. Lewis by William O'Flaherty, Lewis makes the following comment in his rather long entry:
“I think life is rather like a lumpy bed in a bad hotel. At first, you can’t imaging how you can lie in it, much less sleep in it. But presently, one finds the right position and finally one is snoring away.”
In the essay, God in the Dock, “We Have No ‘Right to Happiness’” (1963), written at the end of his life, Lewis remarks:
“…we depend for a very great deal of our happiness or misery on circumstances outside all human control. A right to happiness doesn’t, for me, make much more sense than a right to be six feet tall, or to have a millionaire for your father, or to get good weather whenever you want to have a picnic.”
I have had my fair share of failed ideas, plans, and ventures. What I’ve learned in life is that you have to expect, welcome, and embrace failure, for nothing in life worth doing well comes easily. I truly believe this mindset releases you from worry, forgives you, and allows you to learn from your mistakes so that you don’t make them again.
Whether we like it or not, failure is a part of life and learning, so let’s learn to make the most of tough situations. In the words of Denis Waitley:
“Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.”
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