Never give up

Failure doesn’t mean you will never succeed; it just means success may take a bit longer. John Wayne coined 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 may be to what you want to achieve. But if you give up, you will never know—plus you guarantee that you will never get there. 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. Why? 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 having had to deal with unemployment.

When you have experienced failure, you’re actually in a better position to achieve success than people who have not. 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 for whom good things come too early and too easily. As long as you don’t give up, you’re in a good position. So, the word for today is—‘Stand firm. Let nothing move you.’