ARE YOU GONNA STAY DOWN, OR ARE YOU GONNA GET BACK UP
“If you haven’t succeeded yet, it’s because you haven’t failed enough”
-JEREMY
     There’s a Chinese proverb which says “the gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials”. There times when things won’t always turn out as we expected, whether it is in our relationships, finances, health and myriad other ways. It is how we respond to these critical situations which most people call failure that matter the most, and except you are trying to be oblivious to the obvious, if you aren’t going through one, you’ve sure gone through one of these moments; which I’d call “DEFINING MOMENTS”. These moments are what John mason called “breakfasts of champions”, except you what to be a mediocre, you wouldn’t want one of these moment, and the funny thing is that whether you want to be a champion or not, you would have to go through these moments. Hurdles and obstacles of life are actually there to make us stronger. Someone once said “God prepares great men for great task by great trials. The truth is that successful people have more failures in their lives. If you are familiar with the biography of Abraham Lincoln, you’d know he failed more than he succeeded in life.
He lost his job in 1832.
He was elected to the legislature in 1834.
He suffered the death of his wife in 1834.
He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1836.
He was defeated for the speaker of the state legislature in 1838.
He was defeated or nomination for Congress in 1843, after three years;
He was elected to Congress in 1846.
He was rejected for the position of land officer in 1849.
He was defeated for the Senate in 1854.
He was defeated for the nomination for vice president of the USA in 1856
He suffered another defeat for the post of senate in 1858
He was elected president of the United States in 1860
        After so many defeats, he later said “my question is not whether you’ve failed, but whether you are contented with your failures”. In their song “knock you down”, Kerry Hilson and Kanye west said “when they knock you down, just get back up when they knock you down”. I must admit that it takes a lot of courage to actually get back up from the mud of failure. Let’s consider Mary Kay Ash, I’m certain that most of you ladies her fond of her products, but do you really know the history of failure and hardship of this woman of courage. Her first career was in direct sales, though she was successful in it, she later found that it was hard for a woman to progress in the corporate world-especially in the 1950’s and 1960’s, in her words she said “I had worked up my way up to being a member of the company I was with only to find that, even though our sales force was made up entirely of women, governed by an all male board, my opinions were of no value. I constantly heard, “Mary Kay, you are thinking like a woman again!” I felt rejection in the worst form. So I decided to retire.” Her retirement was short, because she decided to start a business, in respective of the difficulties she was going to experience. Her aim was to give women that were going to work in the business unlimited opportunities, she decided she was going to start a cosmetic business. She acquired the best formula, designed her business strategies and set out to start the business. It didn’t take long when she encountered a difficulty from her attorney who was supposed to make legal arrangement for the business. He told her that “if you are going to throw away your life savings, why don’t you go directly to the trash can? It will be so much easier than what you are proposing.”
        She went ahead and started the business; put her husband in charge of the administrative department of the business, while she took charge of products preparation, packaging and other management aspect of the business. But a month before business was to open her husband died of heart attack, she didn’t let this weigh her down, she kept pursuing her dream business, and launch it on September 13, 1963. And today the company is more than a success.
        We must come to the realization that failure is not a permanent situation, I love what S.I. Hayakawa said “notice what happens when a man says to himself, I failed three times, then what happens when he says, I’m a failure”. Most often time the road to success is at the opposite side of the failure avenue, but the most important thing you could do is to learn from your failures on your way to success street, as Oswald Avery said “whenever you fail, pick something up.” Thomas Edison who invented the light bulb you are probably going to use tonight, after thousands of failure without giving up until he designed it mused “people are not remembered by how few times they failed but how often they succeeded. Every wrong step can be another step forward.” In his book, which I would recommend to people who want to be tougher for tougher situation, “TOUGH TIME NEVER LAST, BUT TOUGH PEOPLE DO” Robert Schuler wrote “look at what you have left, never look at what you have lost” and the irony of failure, is that we only fail, when we fail to learn from evaluated experience(s), that’s why I’d say if you haven’t succeeded yet, it’s because you haven’t failed enough.
       Always remember that most successful people, be it Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Mary Kay Ash, Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther Kings Jnr., Anthony Robbins and the host of others weren’t remember for their failures. So get up, stand up, and win, learn from failure, it often time success in disguise.
           “Fall down seven times, get up eight times”- Japanese proverb
    “For every failure, there’s an alternative course of action. You have to find it. When you come to a roadblock take a detour”
                    -Mary Kay Ash, Founder, Mary Kay Cosmetics.
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