Lessons Learned from Defeat
The most important moment in your life is when you recognize that you have met with defeat. It is the most important because it provides you with a dependable means to foretell the possibilities of your future success.
If you accept defeat as an inspiration to try again, with renewed confidence and determination, the attainment of your success will be only a matter of time. If you accept defeat as final and allow it to destroy your confidence, you may as well abandon your hope of success.
Every defeat you meet will mark an important turning point in your life, for defeat will bring you face to face with the necessity of renewing confidence in yourself, or of admitting that confidence is lacking.
Defeat often serves to relive a man of his conceit. But there is a difference between conceit and self-reliance based upon an honest inventory of one's character. The man who quits when defeat overtakes him thereby indicates that he mistook his conceit for self-reliance.
If a man has genuine self-reliance, he also has sound character, for one springs from the other. And a sound character does not yield to defeat without a fight.
Education, skill and experience are useful assets in every calling, but they will be of little value to the man who, like the Arab of the desert, folds up his tent and silently steals away when he is defeated. The man with a definite major purpose, faith and determination may occasionally be swept from the success side of the River of Life by circumstances beyond his control, but he will not long remain there. For his mental reaction to his defeat will be sufficiently strong to carry him back to the success side where he rightfully belongs. Failure and adversity have introduced many men to opportunities which they would not have recognized under more favourable circumstances. A man's mental attitude in respect to defeat is the factor of major importance in determining whether he rides with the tides of fortune on the success side of the River of Life or is swept to the failure side of circumstances of misfortune.
The circumstances which separate failure from success often are so slight that their real cause is overlooked. Often they exist entirely in the mental attitude with which one meets temporary defeat. The man with a positive mental attitude reacts to defeat in a spirit of determination not to accept it. The man with a negative mental attitude reacts to defeat in a spirit of hopeless acceptance.
The man who maintains a positive mental attitude may have anything in life upon which he may set his heart, so long as it does not conflict with the laws of God and the rights of his fellowmen. He probably will experience many defeats, but he will not surrender to defeat. He will convert it into a stepping stone from which he will rise to higher and higher areas of achievement.
If you accept defeat as an inspiration to try again, with renewed confidence and determination, the attainment of your success will be only a matter of time. If you accept defeat as final and allow it to destroy your confidence, you may as well abandon your hope of success.
Every defeat you meet will mark an important turning point in your life, for defeat will bring you face to face with the necessity of renewing confidence in yourself, or of admitting that confidence is lacking.
Defeat often serves to relive a man of his conceit. But there is a difference between conceit and self-reliance based upon an honest inventory of one's character. The man who quits when defeat overtakes him thereby indicates that he mistook his conceit for self-reliance.
If a man has genuine self-reliance, he also has sound character, for one springs from the other. And a sound character does not yield to defeat without a fight.
Education, skill and experience are useful assets in every calling, but they will be of little value to the man who, like the Arab of the desert, folds up his tent and silently steals away when he is defeated. The man with a definite major purpose, faith and determination may occasionally be swept from the success side of the River of Life by circumstances beyond his control, but he will not long remain there. For his mental reaction to his defeat will be sufficiently strong to carry him back to the success side where he rightfully belongs. Failure and adversity have introduced many men to opportunities which they would not have recognized under more favourable circumstances. A man's mental attitude in respect to defeat is the factor of major importance in determining whether he rides with the tides of fortune on the success side of the River of Life or is swept to the failure side of circumstances of misfortune.
The circumstances which separate failure from success often are so slight that their real cause is overlooked. Often they exist entirely in the mental attitude with which one meets temporary defeat. The man with a positive mental attitude reacts to defeat in a spirit of determination not to accept it. The man with a negative mental attitude reacts to defeat in a spirit of hopeless acceptance.
The man who maintains a positive mental attitude may have anything in life upon which he may set his heart, so long as it does not conflict with the laws of God and the rights of his fellowmen. He probably will experience many defeats, but he will not surrender to defeat. He will convert it into a stepping stone from which he will rise to higher and higher areas of achievement.
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