Saturday, May 3, 2008

Have you failed lately?


There are two ways to fail.
1. You can fail due to your lack of ambition.
2. You can fail because you don't quite achieve your ambition.

Number 1 is a sin against your brain.
Number 2 is a virtue.

Or, as the great film director Ernst Lubitsch put it: "I sometimes make pictures which are not up to my standard, but then it can only be said of a mediocrity that all his work is up to his standard."

Or, as Samuel Beckett put it, "Fail, fail, fail again better."

Our business is not about best practices and how did we do it last time. Our business is meant to be about getting noticed, being heard. You can't move and influence, inspire and motivate if you are bland and invisible.

Even Leo Burnett understood this: "When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either."

All human progress comes from the embrace of failure.

All our mediocre politicians today are motivated by fear of failure. They say and do nothing, lest they offend.

Fail. And succeed.

1 comment:

  1. I failed to come up with a comment befitting the standard of the blog entry. As usual.

    ReplyDelete