A friend shared this in her Facebook profile a few days back and I thought I will share this with you. Something to ponder on over the weekend. Actually it came at the right time when I was thinking of posting something on failure.

I believe that most of us had suffered failures at several points in our lives; although we may not remember all of them. Do You Remember How You Learned to Walk?

Even before you were trying to learn and walk, didn’t you fall down on your bum first? And for me, the first time when I was learning to swim, I almost drowned. Did you almost drown too? The first bicycle ride, I had bad bruises on my knees. Did you have bruises from bicycle ride too?

Something from the Dark Knight, “Why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.” Such simple and straightforward truth. More often than not, we have made things complicated through our thoughts and analysis. Should we have just learnt from our lessons and moved on. Do we allow ourselves to fall and then not picking ourselves up?

Thomas Alva Edison did not learn to talk until he was almost four years old and in school, his mind often wandered, and his teacher, the Reverend Engle, was overheard calling him “addled.” And that was the end of official schooling for him.

And yet he went on to become an American inventor, scientist and businessman who developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world. Edison is considered one of the most prolific inventors in history, holding 1,093 U.S. patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France and Germany (Wikipedia).

Michael Jordan was cut from the varsity team because he was deemed too short to play at that level. He said, “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Did we just miss how many times Thomas Edison and Michael Jordan had fallen before they raised to greatness? I used to think that they shot to success until I realized how many times they had picked themselves up every time they fell down. As the saying goes, “the greatest glory is not in never falling but picking ourselves up every time we fall.”