Quotes About Failure

it takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeded.

A sick-hued darkness overtook Hazel. There was ground, somewhere, and somewhere beyond that there was a palace, and somewhere beyond that was a witch, and somewhere beyond her was a boy who did not want her to come, and she would not come, could not come, because she could not defeat the winter. She was going to collapse here. She would fail.

In his wolf-skin he was as strong as any of them, but he was a gentle person in many ways. He'd feel so bad about failing he'd probably step aside for someone else without a fight.

The mere thought of divorce terrified me. To me, divorce symbolized failure.

this idea of casting yourself into the future, imagining a failure, and then looking back to try to figure out why is called a premortem. Using a premortem is a great tool to help develop high-quality kill criteria.

John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century, summed up this phenomenon well when he said, "Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally." Succeeding unconventionally carries with it the risk of experiencing failure as a result of veering from the status quo.

A higher chance of failing is more tolerated on paths that don't rock the boat. After all, what's the go-to defense in a postmortem after we make a decision that doesn't work out? "I followed procedure," or "I stuck with the status quo," or "I made the consensus choice.

If you had a navigation app for your goals and decisions, it would work like a premortem and a backcast and its output would look like the Decision Exploration Table. You've identified two broad categories of future events (those within and outside your control) that could decrease or increase your chances of failure or success and made an educated guess about their likelihood. You now have a good map of what might lie in the path on the way to your goal.

It is uncomfortable to think about the possibility of failure, but it's worth it to live in that discomfort because you will be better prepared if things don't turn out according to your ideal.

I think that we all share the intuition that the latter case would feel worse, even though that version of you trained for distance running and actually ran 16 miles of a 26.2-mile race, compared with the version of you that never got off the couch. The reason it feels worse is that if you don't try, if you never start the race, there is no failing to reach the finish line because you never set that as a goal for yourself in the first place.

For the company with the three-year plan to double market share, the premortem headline is "Company Fails to Reach Market Share Goal; Growth Again Stalls." Members of the planning team now imagine delays in new products, loss of key executives or sales or marketing or technical personnel, new products by competitors, adverse economic developments, paradigm shifts that could lead customers to do without the product or rely on alternatives not on the market or in use, etc.

Finish lines are funny things. You either reach them or you don't. You either succeed or you fail. There is no in between. Progress along the way matters very little.

Progress along the way should count for something, but we discard it because goals are pass-fail, all-or-nothing, yes-or-no. There's no partial credit given.

As you build things, whether they're train tracks, or bookshelves, or relationships, or essays that you've written for classes, the endowment effect gaffs the scale even more, further escalating our commitment to failing causes.

He considers it his duty to help these founders understand the futility of persevering, so these brilliant people can move on to more worthwhile opportunities. The first obstacle Conway faces is the most obvious one: getting founders to actually recognize that the venture is failing and that it's time for them to walk away. Conway is battling the host of cognitive and motivational forces that make it hard for these entrepreneurs to do that.

It's not just that we need to set more flexible goals. We ourselves also need to be more flexible in the way we evaluate success and failure.

The world should not be organized to require heroines, and when one is required but fails to appear, we should not judge.

The truth is that we have all gone through failure. I have personally as well as professionally experienced failure.

In 2009, I was on top of the world. It was truly the greatest year of my life, both personally and professionally. In 2010, it was the furthest thing from that. It was the most terrible year of my life, both personally and professionally.

I was a frustrated musician, frustrated designer, frustrated art director, frustrated novelist, right. I'd fail at all these different professions.

In film schools of the future, professors will teach 'Tammy' as an object lesson in Making Everything Go Wrong.

You can't just put a bubble over the Westside of L.A. and pretend like there aren't other problems. The way that we are failing the kids in this city through our education system has a profound effect on everybody in the city, and I'm not prepared just to turn a blind eye to that.

A crash is when your competitor's program dies. When your program dies, it is an 'idiosyncrasy'.

I started out in the journalism program, but I got kicked out. I wasn't very good at it. It wasn't where I wanted to be ultimately.