If there is one thing that is endemic to humanity, it is failure. Failure is universal among us. There are more or less successful people; but all people have endured failure.
Failure may happen in politics, morality, business or academics. Failure may happen in relationships or it may happen with one’s own integrity. Regardless, no one lives without tasting the fruit of failure, which can be bitter.
According to the late psychologist B.F. Skinner, “A failure is not always a mistake; it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.” I suppose we have all heard something along these lines from parents, teachers, friends, or clergy. “Don’t give up!” they say. So we push forward trusting that, as someone once said, “Our best successes often come after our greatest disappointments.”
Sometimes our highest hopes are destroyed so that we can be prepared for better things. The failure of the caterpillar is the birth of the butterfly. The passing of the bud is the blooming of the rose. Our failures can be the door to a new success. As the Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, wrote, “The season of failure is the best time for sowing the seeds of success.
The name of John James Audubon is forever associated with the magnificent paintings he made of the birds of North America. No one else has so accurately painted the birds and the natural environment in which they were found. But his success as an artist might not have happened had he not gone bankrupt in business. In 1808, he opened a store in Louisville, Ky. It was after he went bankrupt in 1819 that he began traveling and painting birds. Audubon’s failure in business was his success in visual art.
C.S. Lewis noted that “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement,” but this is not always the case. Often people give up after one or two attempts at something in which they have failed. But success often comes after multiple failed attempts at an endeavor. As Thomas Edison remarked about the continual problems related to his invention of the light bulb: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
It’s usually assumed Handel’s “Messiah” was written at the pinnacle of his success. But that is not the case. The composition of the “Messiah” was written after Handel suffered a stroke. It was written while Handel suffered through a particularly desperate night of despair over his failure as a musician. Upon waking, Handel unleashed his creative genius in a musical score that continues to inspire us generations later.
It may be that failure is universal among us. But so, too, is success. The trick, which really is no trick at all, is dogged persistence. For success rarely comes to one who easily accepts failure as the final word.
