Showing posts with label resilience. Show all posts
Showing posts with label resilience. Show all posts

Friday, February 16, 2018

It's OK to Fail

When you fail, that doesn't make you a failure. After all, failure is universal; it happens to everybody and everywhere. Think of failure as free valuable feedback or tuition fee to learn something new.

Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash

In his book "Resilience", Eric Greitens says, "You will fail. Especially in the beginning. You will fail. And that's not just OK, it's essential. Without resilience, the first failure is also the last -- because it's final. Those who are excellent at their work have learned to comfortably co-exist with failure. The excellent fail more often than the mediocre. They begin more. They attempt more. They attack more. Mastery lives quietly atop a mountain of mistakes."

The flipside of failure is success. "Failure is success if we learn from it," says Malcolm Forbes. 

On an even more positive note, Henry Ford asserts that, "Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently." Get help from an expert or consultant because they have more experience and expertise to help you figure out how you can do better the next time with some training and adjustments, including a change of mindset.

From experience you would be able to attest that the people who have inspired you the most are the ones who have gone through a trial of hardships, struggles and deprivation. For example, Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years in his fight to end apartheid before he was liberated and went on to become the first president of South Africa.  

You will check all the boxes for success as you roll with the punches and get up each time you fail. You are more, much more than the sum of your failures. There is still a lot that is going right with you and you should just treat your failures as mere blips in the course of your life as you learn and grow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson would have you know that, "The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."

Daily Refreshing believes in you and that your best is yet to come. All the best!



Saturday, September 30, 2017

Hot Spring

What springs to your mind when you think of hot spring? 

Perhaps it would be the geysers at Yellowstone National Park, hot pools at Rotorua, New Zealand, or the onsens of Japan. 

Well, the "Hot Spring" by Raymundo Albano can be found at the National Gallery Singapore and it had befuddled me for weeks, and this is my attempt to unravel it.





Albano's over-sized spring is a standout and made all the more so in red. A spring may collapse or dip, but it would invariably spring back to stand tall again. 

Slinky (Graceful in Swedish)
 Photo credit: Andy Brown
When a spring is well made with the best-fit design and materials it would consistently bounce back and stay in its original shape or stance. A spring has its purpose and does well when serving its intended purpose.

Photo credit: AliExpress.com

A spring reminds us that we need to develop our character such as resilience, tenacity and gracefulness so that we remain firmly planted on both our feet like a great boxer who could roll with the punches.

Beetle Bailey may be beaten down again in the the following comic sketch by Mort Walker, but he always bounce back and carry on.  

Image credit: Mort Walker/King Features Syndicate

Setbacks or challenges are like free tuition for us to learn new lessons in life so that once learnt, we can avoid future pitfalls and live our life forward with passion, resilience and strength like a hot spring.