To be successful in life, there are many hurdles you have to get over. For me, the biggest hurdle to success has always been failure. But, growing up, my Dad was always positive... that I'd never amount to anything.
It's a challenge between me and the hurdle, and the hurdle has always won.
Success is always an easier motivator, because you want more of it. But I've also been motivated by failure. Had I medaled in London, I don't think I would be one of the few that have gone to a Summer and Winter. I would have been content with that medal. Instead, I used that failure to go to the Winter Olympics. I always tell people that failure can be one of your biggest motivators if you just have an attitude adjustment about it.
It's the ability to resist failure, in many ways, or use failure that often leads to the greatest success, isn't it?
Cultivate your desire for success to be greater than the fear of failure; Failure is merely a pitstop between where you stand and success. Failure allows you to learn the fastest; Failure inspires winners and defeats losers.
Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure.
What a shame to be so afraid of failure that you stop living. My wife has a great one-liner about failure: "Never consider yourself a failure-you can always serve as a bad example." She is right. Failure can be a better teacher than success.
Ego is certainly there in many of the greatest and most dizzying tales of success - but it's there in some of the greatest stories of failure and self-implosion as well.
I always assume that nothing that I make is going to be a success, that everything I make is going to be a failure - not a failure but not some huge box- office success. If something is an artistic success, I'll be happy, but I'll maybe be the only person that's happy.
Success is not in obtaining the thing. Because there's always another thing. And then you look back on it, and for me, through my evolution, yes I have success by most measures - but for me, when it comes to the greatest joy of reward, there's an emotional element and there's an intellectual element. Emotionally, my greatest joy was the personal relationships I've had. That was the greatest joy. Intellectually, my satisfaction was that I do feel I've evolved well and I'm doing my best to contribute toward evolution.
Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure.
Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I've met people who don't want to try for fear of failing.
In football you go from hurdle to hurdle, there's always something to motivate you, always something you want to get.
Factors such as timing, luck, and destiny have a bearing on success. But success and failure are good teachers. Failure means something better is waiting for you. But I will allow myself to get upset at failure only if I know I have not given it my all.
If you want peace, you've got to deal with people; you don't just deal with objects. And whether they take it as a responsibility or not, the success or failure in Kosovo is going to be the success or failure of building, first, economic hope, and then trying to heal the damage that's been done.
But all at once I realized that it was not my success God had used to enable me to help those in this prison, or in hundreds of others just like it. My life of success was not what made this morning so glorious -- all my achievements meant nothing in God's economy. "No, the real legacy of my life was my biggest failure -- that I was an ex-convict. My greatest humiliation -- being sent to prison -- was the beginning of God's greatest use of my life; He chose the one thing in which I could not glory for His glory.