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Friday, October 19, 2012

How To Get Over Failure


You've started a company and it goes belly-up. Or you launched a new product and not only does it fail to sell, customers actually hate it. Or you get fired.
What happens when you dare to dream, make that dream real, and then fail?
There's the plucky Henry Ford quotation which admittedly, and almost embarrassingly, I have used: "Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently." Since Ford was eventually wildly successful, this aphorism does reassure, but it also jauntily skips over the emotional precipice on which we teeter when we fail.
No matter how many chirpy quotes I may tweet out, when I fail my initial response is despondency, pessimism, and the feeling that perhaps I need to relocate to another city because I can never show my face in public. Ever. Again. I tend to identify with Margery Eldredge Howell, who said: "There's dignity in suffering, nobility in pain, but failure is a salted wound that burns and burns again."

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Not so sure of that. Many of us are in that situation,, and many again realize the situation, employers , I mean, We see what's going on just like you, it's just that there are no jobs we can offer. We are we are
empathetic.