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Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. Sir Winston Churchill
by elv 18y ago
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
Sir Winston Churchill
- Retric 18y agoI agree. Silicon valley's successes tend to never start companies again. So the mantra "learn from failure" has more to do with keeping motivated than directly useful advice.
- jonas_b 18y ago"Silicon valley's successes tend to never start companies again" Really? I thought the opposite was quite true. Marc Andressen, Steve Jobs, Jim Clark etc.
- blackguardx 18y agoI don't think Steve Jobs is a good example here. One could argue that while Steve Jobs made a lot of money from cofounding Apple Computer, he essentially became a failure when he was ousted from the company. If he didn't go on to start NeXT, his failure at Apple probably would have defined him.
- devin 18y agoThis is an interesting example to think about. One might consider that Apple's failure after Jobs' departure suggested Jobs was successful. We're getting into the crux of the interplay between success and failure. They are dependent on one another, and they change with time. Again, this totally undermines any sort of binary representation one might try and espouse.
- mauricio 18y agoExactly. This is what Jason seems to miss. No one sets out for failure nor do they think failure is a good thing. The axioms and other well-known phrases were designed to keep you going after failure, not to inspire you to fail.
- devin 18y agoTotally agree. One other thing I would like to add with respect to this article is that it reeks of a blog post designed to elicit a reaction by pitting two concepts with opposite meanings against one another. This sort of thing is useful when those concepts are concrete and discrete (lazy vs eager evaluation, for instance), but with something as fuzzy as success and failure you just make a mess by trying to place them in artificially constructed boxes. This is in my view another prime example of people trying to think in binary in too many areas of their life. Success does not exist without failure, literally. Success is the absence of failure. They need one another to exist. Trying to write about how one is more important than the other is, IMO, a fool's errand.
- jfornear 18y ago"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." -Neils Bohr