Failure doesn’t mean you’ll never succeed; it just means it might take a bit longer. John Wayne spoke a great line in the movie The Train Robbers. He said, ‘You’re going to spend the rest of your life getting up one more time than you’re knocked down, so you’d better start getting used to it.’ That’s what success is – getting up one time more than you were knocked down. You have no idea how close you might be to what you want to achieve. But if you give up, you’ll never know – plus, you’ll never actually get there. Author Ben Stein said, ‘The human spirit is never finished when it is defeated. It is finished when it surrenders.’ Time magazine conducted a survey among people who had lost their jobs. Everyone expected them to be crestfallen and disheartened, but they found them to be extremely resilient. The survey showed that people who had lost jobs and found new ones were better prepared to deal with adversity than those who had been with the same company for years without ever needing to face and deal with unemployment. When you’ve experienced failure, you’re actually in a better position to achieve success than people who haven’t. When you fail and fail again – and keep bouncing back and learning from your failures – you’re building character, strength, tenacity, experience, and wisdom. And people who develop these qualities are capable of sustaining their successes, unlike those who gained good things too early and too easily. As long as you don’t give up, you’re in a good position. So today, remember – ‘Stand firm. Let nothing move you.’
