Harpo Marx on Television
6 hours ago
Monday, December 27, 2010
On Success and Failure
“Failure’s hard, but success is far more dangerous. If you’re successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever.”– Po Bronson
And it made me think of other wise things I have heard on the subject over the years:
To divide men into the successful and the unsuccessful is to look at human nature from a narrow, preconceived point of view. Are you a success or not? Am I? Was Napoleon? Is your servant Vassily? What is the criterion?
One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake. --Anton Chekhov
"Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."--Winston Churchill
"There is no burden greater than a high potential."--Charles M. Schultz
"It's easier to live if you are not afraid to die."--Confucius
Failure is a fact of being an artist, and it is also a fact of life. No one enjoys failure, but once you recognize that we learn far more from failures than we due from successes, and you also accept that some failure is inevitable on the road to mastery, then it becomes easier to deal with.
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1 comment:
I like the Anton Chekov quotation the best. I think it's really important to be clear on how you define success. Seems like we think this is just obvious, but it isn't...you must examine your values.
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