This quote caught my eye last Tuesday: “The arrow that hits the bull’s eye is the result of a hundred misses.”
Some wise old sage said it this way: “Try, try again.”
Winston Churchill said “Never, never, never give up!”
Babe Ruth was known as the homerun king, but some say he was also the strikeout king.
How many times have you and I tried and failed?
I remember a very painful experience in the ninth grade. The song Wipeout has just come on the rock-n-roll music scene, made popular by The Ventures and others. Wipeout is an all-instrumental number which features the drummer on a series of drum breaks spaced throughout the tune.
At a powder-puff football game, our jazz band was asked to provide the half-time music and our regular drummer couldn’t play so they asked me to fill in.
After we played the selected songs, someone in the stands shouted out Wipeout. The leader of the group asked me if I could play that song and I assured him I could.
Well, let’s just say it was less than wonderful. I overestimated my abilities at that point in my life and made a royal mess of that song and bruised my ego along the way. Hopefully no one remembers that fiasco except me, all these years later.
You see, I completely missed the bull’s eye that night. Thankfully, I managed to get in more practice as time went on and became an able drummer.
It’s like this in anything in life that we attempt. We swing, we miss, we sometimes strike out, but we keep going back up to the plate. Do we ever successfully do anything of worth with great skill the very first time we try? Probably not.
Just because we mess up occasionally doesn’t mean we are failures. We keep going back up to bat. That is the key. Swing and swing again. Try and try again.
I love watching my grandchildren. Eliot is ten months old and he has been learning how to put his thumb into his mouth. At times he would miss completely, or end up with knuckles and all in there, or sometimes his little finger and ring finger. His objective all along has been to go for the thumb. He finally mastered it. Yeah, Eliot!!! But he missed a few times along the way.
There is a terrific new book out called The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle that you should know about. It has such rich content that I’ll let you discover that for yourself, but the bottom line is this: It matters not that we don’t successfully succeed the first time. We correct our angle, our stance, we practice and try again. We get better with each attempt. We study, we read, we practice,we evaluate, and we practice some more. That is the secret to hitting the bull’s eye.
Daniel says this, “Growing skill requires practice. Deep practice requires intense concentration, persistence and repetition, while making small corrections. Try something, firing a neuro-circuit and making a mistake, realizing you made that mistake and trying again. So the errors you make – the failures – are not failures, really. They are pieces of information you can use to put together the proper movement.
“People improve talent by learning from their mistakes. It’s finding and fixing. When it comes to finding ways to get into the neuro-spot, you need to reach and fail and fix, over and over again. This is what progress looks like.”
Michael Jordan once said: “I have missed over 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot … and missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life – and that is precisely why I have succeeded.”
I haven’t always won at everything I’ve put my hands to. I’ve had relationship foul-ups, job mismatches, made poor decisions, and a host of other misfires in my life. But I keep aiming. I keep shooting. I keep trying. That’s the secret.
Thomas J. Watson of IBM fame once said, “The way to succeed is to double your error rate.”
Look, listen, learn, observe, self-correct, practice and do it again. The bull’s eye is in sight, and with modifications, angle adjustments and practice I bet you can hit it.
Ready. Aim. Go for it!!!
Some wise old sage said it this way: “Try, try again.”
Winston Churchill said “Never, never, never give up!”
Babe Ruth was known as the homerun king, but some say he was also the strikeout king.
How many times have you and I tried and failed?
I remember a very painful experience in the ninth grade. The song Wipeout has just come on the rock-n-roll music scene, made popular by The Ventures and others. Wipeout is an all-instrumental number which features the drummer on a series of drum breaks spaced throughout the tune.
At a powder-puff football game, our jazz band was asked to provide the half-time music and our regular drummer couldn’t play so they asked me to fill in.
After we played the selected songs, someone in the stands shouted out Wipeout. The leader of the group asked me if I could play that song and I assured him I could.
Well, let’s just say it was less than wonderful. I overestimated my abilities at that point in my life and made a royal mess of that song and bruised my ego along the way. Hopefully no one remembers that fiasco except me, all these years later.
You see, I completely missed the bull’s eye that night. Thankfully, I managed to get in more practice as time went on and became an able drummer.
It’s like this in anything in life that we attempt. We swing, we miss, we sometimes strike out, but we keep going back up to the plate. Do we ever successfully do anything of worth with great skill the very first time we try? Probably not.
Just because we mess up occasionally doesn’t mean we are failures. We keep going back up to bat. That is the key. Swing and swing again. Try and try again.
I love watching my grandchildren. Eliot is ten months old and he has been learning how to put his thumb into his mouth. At times he would miss completely, or end up with knuckles and all in there, or sometimes his little finger and ring finger. His objective all along has been to go for the thumb. He finally mastered it. Yeah, Eliot!!! But he missed a few times along the way.
There is a terrific new book out called The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle that you should know about. It has such rich content that I’ll let you discover that for yourself, but the bottom line is this: It matters not that we don’t successfully succeed the first time. We correct our angle, our stance, we practice and try again. We get better with each attempt. We study, we read, we practice,we evaluate, and we practice some more. That is the secret to hitting the bull’s eye.
Daniel says this, “Growing skill requires practice. Deep practice requires intense concentration, persistence and repetition, while making small corrections. Try something, firing a neuro-circuit and making a mistake, realizing you made that mistake and trying again. So the errors you make – the failures – are not failures, really. They are pieces of information you can use to put together the proper movement.
“People improve talent by learning from their mistakes. It’s finding and fixing. When it comes to finding ways to get into the neuro-spot, you need to reach and fail and fix, over and over again. This is what progress looks like.”
Michael Jordan once said: “I have missed over 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot … and missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life – and that is precisely why I have succeeded.”
I haven’t always won at everything I’ve put my hands to. I’ve had relationship foul-ups, job mismatches, made poor decisions, and a host of other misfires in my life. But I keep aiming. I keep shooting. I keep trying. That’s the secret.
Thomas J. Watson of IBM fame once said, “The way to succeed is to double your error rate.”
Look, listen, learn, observe, self-correct, practice and do it again. The bull’s eye is in sight, and with modifications, angle adjustments and practice I bet you can hit it.
Ready. Aim. Go for it!!!
That's exactly right, Mike - failure is whatever we see it as. We can see it as a learning process or we can focus on the failure and ruin our perspective. Thanks for this encouragement to keep on trying!
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