Fail Your Way To The Top

Friday, January 4, 2008, 18:51

Arts and Literature

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Fail Your Way To The Top

Fail Your Way To The Top

After Thomas Edison’s first 5,000 experiments failed

while trying to develop the carbon impregnated filament

which would light the first incandescent lightbulb a

young journalist came to interview him and said,

“Mr. Edison, why do you persist in wasting your time

in these foolish experiments? Everybody knows that

there’s no future in electric light.” Edison said, “Young man,

you don’t understand how the world works, but I want to

tell you something. I have not failed at all. I have successfully

identified 5,000 ways which will not work, which puts

me just 5,000 ways closer to the way which will work.” Thomas Edison was the greatest failure in the history
of invention. Thomas Edison failed more times and lost
more money in experiments that were unsuccessful than
any other inventor in modern history. Thomas Edison
was also the greatest inventor in modern history.
He patented 1,097 devices at the U.S. Patent Office and
made hundreds of millions of dollars for himself and
countless others. Michael Jordan stated, “I’ve missed over nine thousand

shots in my career. I’ve lost over three hundred games.

Twenty-six times I took the game winning shot and missed…

and because of the failures, I am a success.” Napoleon Hill, in his classic work, “The Encyclopedia of Success”,

for which he interviewed 500 of the most successful men

and women in America, found that almost every single one

of them achieved their greatest success just one step

beyond where they had reached their greatest failure:

that one of the most common causes of failure is the habit

of quitting when one is overtaken by temporary defeat.

When you get into a tight place and everything goes
against you, till it seems you could not hold on a
minute longer, never give up then, for that is just
the place and time that the tide will turn. -Harriet
Beecher Stowe

When someone asked Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM
“What is the key to success?” his reply was, “Double
your rate of failure!” Really successful people have
literally failed their way to the top.

It is in understanding and embracing the concept of
failure that we achieve true greatness as human beings. -Brian Tracy

You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are
doomed if you don’t try. -Beverly Sills