Topic : Failure

Did you hear about the man who tried to run a symphony and did such a bad job they decided to electrocute him? But they couldn’t, he was such a poor conductor.

The Bell, the Clapper, and the Cord: Wit and Witticism, (Baltimore: National Federation of the Blind, 1994), p. 6

He felt like a failure! Everything he attempted seemed to turn out wrong. He began to fantasize about being rich. He would do the one thing he could do to make the most money in the briefest period of time. He would take up the occupation of bank robbing.

The would-be bank robber began to plan his strategy. He sat up late at night working on detailed plans, drawing sketches and going over steps he would take in robbing the bank. But he could never seem to get around to robbing the bank. He would plan each night, but when morning came, his anxiety paralyzed him, again.

One night he determined that his mind was made up. Regardless of his feelings he would force himself to rob the bank the next morning. The next morning an anxiety attack paralyzed him again. Finally he came through it and forced himself to get into his car and go to the bank.

The reluctant bank robber sat in the car in the parking lot from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. trying to force himself out of the car. Finally, he got out of the car and went into the bank. At the teller’s window he handed the teller his pistol. He stuck his brown paper bag in her face and said, “Don’t stick with me. This is a mess-up.”

Darrell W. Robinson, People Sharing Jesus, (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1995), p. xx

• Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising each time we fall. - Oliver Goldsmith
• Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you learn to do it well. - Zig Ziglar
• God don’t sponsor no flops. - Ethel Waters
• Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom. - Gen. George Patton
• The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything. - Theodore Roosevelt
• He who never makes a mistake never makes anything. - A. Lincoln(?)
• Failure is an event, never a person. (William Brown, Welcome Stress!)

Sources unknown

After more than twenty years in pastoral activity, I am clearer now that failure is integral to Christian ministry. It was for Jesus in His ministry: He failed with the young ruler; He failed in Nazareth because of the people’s unbelief; He failed with Judas Iscariot; He failed with the bulk of His fellow countrymen; He failed with the religious leadership; He failed with nine of the ten lepers; He failed with Pontius Pilate. In the face of repeated failure, Jesus learned to abide firmly in the love of His Father and to keep His Father’s Word.

These events in His ministry were not mistakes. He took the risk of being open with people with the love of God: many responded favorably, many did not. If, then, we live in the love of God and listen to the Word of God, we will meet constant failure. It will be tempting, because we live in such a results-dominated society, to see failure as reprehensible and therefore to be avoided. One way to avoid failure is to call it a mistake—and then to try to eliminate any mistakes, to make sure we get things right and that we succeed. Many local churches base their activities on such priorities and virtually reject anything that is at all risky, because “we cannot afford to make mistakes.”

David Prior, Creating Community, (Colorado Springs: NAVPRESS, 1992), pp. 17-18

Did you hear about the guy who is both a taxidermist and a veterinarian?

He has a sign on his door: “Either way, you get your dog back.”

Contributed by Beth L. Mack, Reader’s Digest, May 1996, p. 67.

“One of the reasons why mature people stop growing and learning,” says John Gardner, “is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.”

Eating Problems for Breakfast by Tim Hansel, Word Publishing, 1988, p. 32

• No Easy Answers, W. L. Craig, Moody, 1990, pp. 59ff.
• Holy Sweat, Tim Hansel, Word, 1987, p.117.
• Wake Up Calls, Ron Hutchcraft, Moody, 1990, p.18.

Edison spent more than $100,000 to obtain 6000 different fiber specimens, and only three of them proved satisfactory. Each failure brought him that much closer to the solution to his problem. His friend Henry Ford was right when he said that failure was the “opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.”

Warren W. Wiersbe, Confident Living, September, 1987, p. 22

You must pay for what you want. Temporary failure may be the price. If it occurs, accept it and move on. The absence of failure suggests a minimum of effort, and the likelihood that little will be achieved. In many cases failure can occur despite genuine effort. In such cases failure may be the next best thing to success.

Bits and Pieces, January 9, 1992, p. 6.

A football coach gave this advice on how to deal with failures. “When you’re about to be run out of town, get out in front and make it look like you’re heading a parade.”

Bits & Pieces, April 30, 1992

Thomas Edison’s manufacturing facilities in West Orange, N. J., were heavily damaged by fire one night in December, 1914. Edison lost almost $1 million worth of equipment and the record of much of his work. The next morning, walking about the charred embers of his hopes and dreams, the 67-year-old inventor said: “There is value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Now we can start anew.”

Alan Loy McGinnis, The Power of Optimism.

When Jim Burke became the head of a new products division at Johnson & Johnson, one of his first projects was the development of a children’s chest rub. The product failed miserably, and Burke expected that he would be fired. When he was called in to see the chairman of the board, however, he met a surprising reception. “Are you the one who just cost us all that money?” asked Robert Wood Johnson. “Well I just want to congratulate you. If you are making mistakes, that means you are taking risks, and we won’t grow unless you take risks.” Some years later, when Burke himself became chairman of J & J, he continued to spread that word.

Reader’s Digest, October, 1991, p. 62.

Life is a leaf of paper white
Whereon each one of us may write
His word or two, and then comes night.

Greatly begin! though thou have time
But for a line, be that sublime—
Not failure, but low aim, is crime.

James Russell Lowell

Source unknown

Verdi’s opera “La Traviata” was a failure when it was first performed. Even though the singers chosen for the leading roles were the best of the day, everything went wrong. The tenor had a cold and sang in a hoarse, almost inaudible voice. The soprano who played the part of the delicate, sickly heroine was one of the stoutest ladies on or off stage, and very healthy and loud.

At the beginning of the Third Act when the doctor declares that consumption was wasted away the “frail, young lady” and she cannot live more than a few hours, the audience was thrown into a spasm of laughter, a state very different from that necessary to appreciate the tragic moment!

Charles Swindoll, Living Above the Level of Mediocrity, p. 182

After the horrible carnage and Confederate retreat at Gettysburg, General Robert E. Lee wrote this to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy: “We must expect reverses, even defeats. They are sent to teach us wisdom and prudence, to call forth greater energies, and to prevent our falling into greater disasters.”

MBI’s Today In The Word, November, 1989, p. 21.

Will Rogers’ stage specialty used to be rope tricks. One day, on stage, in the middle of his act, he got tangled in is lariat. Instead of getting upset, he drawled, “A rope ain’t so bad to get tangled up in if it ain’t around your neck.” The audience roared. Encouraged by the warm reception, Rogers began adding humorous comments to all his performances. It was the comments, not the rope tricks, that eventually made him famous.

Chuck Swindoll, Growing Strong in the Seasons of Life, p. 29, cf. pp. 69, 244.

Between 1962 and 1977 Arthur Pedrick patented 162 inventions. Sounds impressive until you realize that none of them were taken up commercially. Among his greatest inventions were:

• a bicycle with amphibious capability.
• an arrangement whereby a car could be driven from the back seat.
• several golf inventions, including a golf ball that could be steered in flight.

The grandest scheme of Pedrick, who described himself as the “One-Man-Think-Tank Basic Research Laboratories of Sussex,” was to irrigate deserts of the world by sending a constant supply of snowballs from the polar region through a massive network of giant peashooters.

Some onlookers thought it was unusual, but few noticed when the pastor wheeled into the church parking lot in a borrowed pickup truck. But everyone’s eyes were upon him when he backed the truck across the lawn to his study door. Refusing comment or assistance, he began to empty his office onto the truck bed. He was impassive and systematic: first the desk drawers, then the files, and last his library of books, which he tossed carelessly into a heap, many of them flopping askew like slain birds. His task done, the pastor left the church and, as was later learned, drove some miles to the city dump where he committed everything to the waiting garbage. It was his way of putting behind him the overwhelming sense of failure and loss that he had experienced in the ministry. This young, gifted pastor was determined never to return to the ministry. Indeed, he never did.

Liberating Ministry From The Success Syndrome, K Hughes, Tyndale, 1988, p. 9

• You must have long-range goals to keep you from being frustrated by short-term failures. - Charles Noble
• Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, “I have failed three times,” and what happens when he says, “I am a failure.” - S. I. Hayakawa

Sources unknown

During 1978 during the fireman’s strike in England, the British army took over emergency firefighting. On January 14 they were called out by an elderly lady in South London to retrieve her cat. They arrived with impressive haste, very cleverly and carefully rescued the cat, and started to drive away. But the lady was so grateful she invited the squad of heroes in for tea. Driving off later with fond farewells and warm waving of arms, they ran over the cat and killed it.

Source unknown

• Review: what I did right, wrong; strengths and weaknesses of opponents.
• Renew: I can give up or go on. Recommit life to the Lord.
• Redo: Implement your plan, get started.

Source unknown

Remember Vinko Bogatej? He was a ski-jumper from Yugoslavia who, while competing in the 1970 World Ski-Flying Championship in Obertsdorf, West Germany, fell off the takeoff ramp and landed on his head. Ever since, the accident has been used to highlight “the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat” on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports.” Bogatej was hospitalized after the spill, but he has recovered and now works in a foundry in Yugoslavia.

Doug Wilson, a producer for ABC, interviewed him last year for a special anniversary edition of the show. “When we told him he’s been on the program ever since 1970,” says Wilson, “he couldn’t believe it. He appears on Television 130 times a year.”

Thomas Rogers in N. Y. Times, quoted in December, 1980, Reader’s Digest

Our success in this venture means nothing less than the opening of the country for the gospel; our failure, at most, nothing more than the death of two or three deluded fanatics. Still, even death is not failure. His purposes are accomplished. He uses deaths as well as lives in the furtherance of His cause.

Walter Gowans, 1883, a founder of SIM. On Dec. 4, 1893, Walter Gowans and Rowland Bingham of Toronto, Canada, and Thomas Kent of Buffalo, N. Y., landed at Lagos, Nigeria. Their aim was to establish a witness among the 60 million people of what was then commonly known as the Soudan, the area south of the Sahara between the Niger River and the Nile. Gowans and Kent died in the first few months. Bingham returned to Canada, formed a council, and went back to Africa in 1900. That attempt, too, was unsuccessful. In 1901 Bingham sent out a party that succeeded in establishing the Mission’s first base, at Patigi, 500 miles up the Niger River. When these first SIM pioneers landed in Nigeria, Gowans was 25 years old, Bingham was two weeks away from his 21st birthday, Kent was 23.

“It is the impassioned pleading of a quiet little Scottish lady that linked my life with the Soudan,” wrote Rowland Bingham (a founder of SIM). “In the quietness of her parlor she told how God had called a daughter to China, and her eldest boy (Walter Gowans) to the Soudan.

“She spread out before me the vast extent of those thousands of miles and filled in the teeming masses of people. Ere I closed the interview she had place upon me the burden of the Soudan.”

A year and a half later Bingham returned to Canada, alone. Walter and Thomas Kent lay buried in Nigeria’s interior.

“I visited Mrs. Gowans to take her the few personal belongings of her son,” he recalled. “She met me with extended hand. We stood there in silence. “Then she said these words: ‘Well, Mr. Bingham, I would rather have had Walter go out to the Soudan and die there, all alone, that have him home today, disobeying his Lord.’”

Rest of the Story, p. 115

The prize for the most useless weapon of all times goes to the Russians. They invented the “dog mine.” The plan was to train the dogs to associate food with the undersides of tanks, in the hope that they would run hungrily beneath advancing Panzer divisions. Bombs were then strapped to the dogs’ backs, which endangered the dogs to the point where no insurance company would look at them. Unfortunately, the dogs associated food solely with Russian tanks. The plan was begun the first day of the Russian involvement in World War II...and abandoned on day two. The dogs with bombs on their backs forced an entire Soviet division to retreat.

Source unknown

• In 1902, the poetry editor of Atlantic Monthly returned a stack of poems with this note, “Our magazine has no room for your vigorous verse.” The poet was Robert Frost.
• In 1905, the University of Bern turned down a doctoral dissertation as “irrelevant and fanciful.” The writer of that paper was Albert Einstein.
• In 1894 an English teacher noted on a teenager’s report card, “A conspicuous lack of success.” The student was Winston Churchill.

Signs of the Times, March 1988, p. 12

One ballplayer set the major league record for strikeouts with 1316. The same player set a record for five consecutive strikeouts in a World Series game. The holder of both records was the great slugger Babe Ruth

Celebrity Trivia, E. Lucaire

The great inventor Charles Kettering suggested that we must learn to fail intelligently. He said, “Once you’ve failed, analyze the problem and find out why, because each failure is one more step leading up to the cathedral of success. The only time you don’t want to fail is the last time you try.”

Here are three suggestions for turning failure into success:

• Honestly face defeat; never fake success.
• Exploit the failure; don’t waste it. Learn all you can from it; every bitter experience can teach us something.
• Never use failure as an excuse for not trying again.

You may not be able to reclaim the loss, undo the damage, or reverse the consequences, but you can make a new start—wiser, more sensitive, renewed by the Holy spirit, and more determined to do right.

Source unknown

• General Mark Clark was one of the great heroes of WWII. He led the Salerno invasion that Winston Churchill said was “the most daring amphibious operation we have launched, or which, I think, has ever been launched on a similar scale in war.” At the time Clark was promoted to Lt. General, he was the youngest man of that rank in the U.S. Army. He graduated from West Point in 1917. At the top of his class? Nope. He was 111th from the top in a class of 139!
• Even if you never earned a college degree, don’t worry, you’re in good company. Irving Berlin, for instance, only had two years of formal schooling. He never learned how to read music. When he composed his songs, he would hum the melody and a musical secretary would write down the notes. He became one of the greatest songwriters the country has ever known.
• Napoleon Bonaparte graduated 42nd in a class of 58 at military school.

Bits and Pieces, December 13, 1990

Thomas Edison invented the microphone, the phonograph, the incandescent light, the storage battery, talking movies, and more than 1000 other things. December 1914 he had worked for 10 years on a storage battery. This had greatly strained his finances. This particular evening spontaneous combustion had broken out in the film room. Within minutes all the packing compounds, celluloid for records and film, and other flammable goods were in flames. Fire companies from eight surrounding towns arrived, but the heat was so intense and the water pressure so low that the attempt to douse the flames was futile. Everything was destroyed. Edison was 67.

With all his assets going up in a whoosh (although the damage exceeded two million dollars, the buildings were only insured for $238,000 because they were made of concrete and thought to be fireproof), would his spirit be broken?

The inventor’s 24-year old son, Charles, searched frantically for his father. He finally found him, calmly watching the fire, his face glowing in the reflection, his white hair blowing in the wind. “My heart ached for him,” said Charles. “He was 67—no longer a young man—and everything was going up in flames. When he saw me, he shouted, ‘Charles, where’s your mother?’ When I told him I didn’t know, he said, ‘Find her. Bring her here. She will never see anything like this as long as she lives.’”

The next morning, Edison looked at the ruins and said, “There is great value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God we can start anew.” Three weeks after the fire, Edison managed to deliver the first phonograph.

Swindoll, Hand Me Another Brick, Thomas Nelson, 1978, pp. 82-3, and Bits and Pieces, November, 1989, p. 12

It is said that Thomas Edison performed 50,000 experiments before he succeeded in producing a storage battery. We might assume the famous inventor would have had some serious doubts along the way. But when asked if he ever became discouraged working so long without results, Edison replied, “Results? Why, I know 50,000 things that won’t work.”

Today in the Word, August, 1990

On New Year’s Day, 1929, Georgia Tech played University of California in the Rose Bowl. In that game a man named Roy Riegels recovered a fumble for California. Somehow, he became confused and started running 65 yards in the wrong direction. One of his teammates, Benny Lom, outdistanced him and downed him just before he scored for the opposing team. When California attempted to punt, Tech blocked the kick and scored a safety which was the ultimate margin of victory.

That strange play came in the first half, and everyone who was watching the game was asking the same question: “What will Coach Nibbs Price do with Roy Riegels in the second half?” The men filed off the field and went into the dressing room. They sat down on the benches and on the floor, all but Riegels. He put his blanket around his shoulders, sat down in a corner, put his face in his hands, and cried like a baby.

If you have played football, you know that a coach usually has a great deal to say to his team during half time. That day Coach Price was quiet. No doubt he was trying to decide what to do with Riegels. Then the timekeeper came in and announced that there were three minutes before playing time. Coach Price looked at the team and said simply, “Men the same team that played the first half will start the second.” The players got up and started out, all but Riegels. He did not budge. the coach looked back and called to him again; still he didn’t move. Coach Price went over to where Riegels sat and said, “Roy, didn’t you hear me? The same team that played the first half will start the second.” Then Roy Riegels looked up and his cheeks were wet with a strong man’s tears.

“Coach,” he said, “I can’t do it to save my life. I’ve ruined you, I’ve ruined the University of California, I’ve ruined myself. I couldn’t face that crowd in the stadium to save my life.”

Then Coach Price reached out and put his hand on Riegel’s shoulder and said to him: “Roy, get up and go on back; the game is only half over.” And Roy Riegels went back, and those Tech men will tell you that they have never seen a man play football as Roy Riegels played that second half.

Haddon W. Robinson, Christian Medical Society Journal

I hold very stern opinions with regard to Christian men who have fallen into gross sin. I rejoice that they may be truly converted, and may be mingled with hope and caution received into the church; but I question, gravely question whether a man who has grossly sinned should be very readily restored to the pulpit. As John Angell James remarks, "When a preacher of righteousness has stood in the way of sinners, he should never again open his lips in the great congregation until his repentance is as notorious as his sin.? My belief is that we should be very slow to help back to the pulpit men, who having once been tried, have proved themselves to have too little grace to stand the crucial test of ministerial life.

Charles Spurgeon, quoted in Point Man, Steve Farrar, pp. 77-8