Get Up On That Board and Try Again!

 

Dennis Edwards

My wife and I have come on a three week holiday of rest, relaxation, and spiritual refilling while we also visit with her family in the sunny clime of Tenerife. Yesterday as we relaxed by a natural pool at the north of the island, I was drawn to watch a young group of female surfers not far from the shore. I had over-heard their instructor giving some last minute instructions before they enterred the water. The tide was high and a little rough and off the young women went with their surf-boards into the water.

The instructor left without a board but with two sponge supports to help to keep her afloat. She would stay in the water and try to help position the girls to enable them to catch the waves. As I watched, I noticed that some of the girls would attempt over and over again and be thrown from their boards over and over again. And yet they persisted. Others seemed to be content to sit on their boards and watch the others from the sidelines. They would never get close to where the instructor was giving aid to those who wanted to try and mount the waves.

Finally, one girl managed to mount her board and came roaring toward the natural pool from where I was watching. She had fallen numerous times before, but in the end, she had success. I clapped enthusiastically as she came close and a big smile rose on her face. She had done it. She had perservered and had succeeded.

Watching these events before my eyes brought to mind a lecture I had listened to on YouTube and an article I had read by John Maxwell just a few days before. You can find it at:

https://fightforyourfaith.blogspot.com/2021/07/failing-forward-with-john-maxwell.html

In that talk, or one similar, Maxwell shares the importance of failure in regards to success. In order to succeed, you have got to fail trying. He says we need to fail forward, not backward. Failing forward means that even though we failed, we know we are closer to success because of it. We have learned something important from the failure which will help us in our next attempt. Everyone who ever became successful failed in the process, but they didn’t let failure pull them down. They had the right perspective of failure.

Like the story of George Bernard Shaw who couldn’t public speak. He became a famous public speaker only after forcing himself to confront his difficulty by joining a debating club where he made a fool of himself innumerable times. The girl who surfed to the beach had made a fool of herself in her attempts. But she knew those failures were the price of success. She had failure in its proper perspective. Every time she fell off that board she knew she was getting closer to victory, closer to learning the trick of keeping her balance, closer to mastering the board and becoming an accomplished surfer. She was failing forward.

Those others who stayed comfortably on their boards, fearing even to attempt, never got any further. They never failed and never made a fool of themselves, or swallowed water as they fell into the surf, because they never tried. They stayed comfortable and secure but never tasted the savour of success. They never tasted the thrill of mounting both board and wave to surf esctatically toward the shore.

Friends, if we want to succeed, we need to face failure as the impostor that she is. Failure is the stepping stone to success. If you are not failing, it may very well be that you gave up trying. You have sat down in safety and security, instead of forging ahead to new goals, new challenges, new learning experiences, new failures which lead to new success.

Don’t fail backward by giving up when you fail. Failure is a prerequisite to success. Pick up your board and try again. The waters great and you’ll come home fulfilled and sleep well even though you may have aches and pains for trying. And tomorrow, you may just get up on the board and that wave and ride yourself to victory far greater than you ever thought. Remember our instructor has told us that He is able to do exceeding abundantly above all we ask or think. But we’ve got to cooperate and get up on that board even if we fail trying! In the end, if we fail forward, we will make it! Here are John Maxwell’s notes on failing backward or failing forward.

“I don’t know what obstacles you are facing in your life right now. But whatever they are doesn’t matter. What does matter is that your life can change if you’re willing to look at failure differently. You have the potential to overcome any problems, mistakes, or misfortunes. All you have to do is learn to fail forward. Look at the way any achiever approaches negative experiences, and you can learn a lot about how to fail forward. Read through these two lists, and determine which one describes your approach to failure: Think about a recent setback you experienced. How did you respond? No matter how difficult your problems were, the key to overcoming them doesn’t lie in changing your circumstances. It’s in changing yourself. That in itself is a process, and it begins with a desire to be teachable. If you’re willing to do that, then you’ll be able to handle failure. From this moment on, make a commitment to do whatever it takes to fail forward.” ~ From his book “Failing Forward”

“Failing Backward: Blaming others. Repeating the same mistake. Expecting never to fail. Expecting to continually fail. Accepting tradition blindly. Being limited by past mistakes. Thinking “I am a failure.” Quitting.”

“Failing Forward: Taking responsibility. Learning from each mistake. Knowing failure is part of the process. Maintaining a positive attitude. Challenging outdated assumptions. Taking new risks. Believing something didn’t work. Persevering.”

The picture above was actually taken the day before. The water wasn’t as rough. Some surfers are seen in the right of the page in the distance in the water. The picture below shows the natural pool. The surfers were surfing off to the left and coming towards the pool.

Happy surfing! Get up on that board and try again. Ride that wave or fail trying!

 

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John Maxwell on “Failing Forward”

“Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure.” -Napoleon Hill

When I was growing up, one of the questions I used to hear from motivational speakers was this: “If the possibility of failure were erased, what would you attempt to achieve?” That seemed to be an intriguing question. At the time it prompted me to look ahead to life’s possibilities. But then one day I realized that it was really a bad question. Why? Because it takes a person’s thinking down the wrong track. There is no achievement without failure. To even imply that it might be possible gives people the wrong impression. So here’s a better question: If your perception of and response to failure were changed, what would you attempt to achieve?

I don’t know what obstacles you are facing in your life right now. But whatever they are doesn’t matter. What does matter is that your life can change if you’re willing to look at failure differently. You have the potential to overcome any problems, mistakes, or misfortunes. All you have to do is learn to fail forward. Look at the way any achiever approaches negative experiences, and you can learn a lot about how to fail forward. Read through these two lists, and determine which one describes your approach to failure: Think about a recent setback you experienced. How did you respond? No matter how difficult your problems were, the key to overcoming them doesn’t lie in changing your circumstances. It’s in changing yourself. That in itself is a process, and it begins with a desire to be teachable. If you’re willing to do that, then you’ll be able to handle failure. From this moment on, make a commitment to do whatever it takes to fail forward. ~ From Failing Forward

Failing Backward: Blaming others. Repeating the same mistake. Expecting never to fail. Expecting to continually fail. Accepting tradition blindly. Being limited by past mistakes. Thinking “I am a failure.” Quitting.

 Failing Forward: Taking responsibility. Learning from each mistake. Knowing failure is part of the process. Maintaining a positive attitude. Challenging outdated assumptions. Taking new risks. Believing something didn’t work. Persevering.

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Be All That You Can Be! Part 1

From the Roadmap 

Each person is different. Each person is unique. We each have different gifts, callings, and ministries. You are an individual creation, and the Lord in His wisdom knew what He was doing when He made you the way you are! He wants to use your individuality and the talents He has given you and help you to develop them so that you can go further and make the most of your situation.

He wants you to be all that you can be. He wants you to strive for your personal best.—That is, taking your particular gifts, talents, life experience, and really doing something with it, investing in it, and making the most of it possible; not being content with halfway or almost or kinda, but wanting to do the most and the best with your life.

Why be content with going only so far? Why not be the best you can be? There’s a certain happiness and fulfillment that comes as a reward to those that push themselves to be more, those that give their all in a commitment to a higher goal. Really awesome accomplishments often come as a result of hundreds, even thousands of small sacrifices and right decisions. Anything great in life costs, and that cost often comes to you through lots and lots of plodding along, day by day, come rain or shine, no matter how you feel.

Every great man who has gone far and accomplished amazing things did so through years of hard work, sacrifice, vision, determination, and faithfulness. If we’re willing to learn that, then we will have hit on the secret to success in any situation that we find ourselves in, because we will have learned what it means to make the most of our circumstances, to rise to the occasion, to be all that we can be, and to reach our personal best, by God’s grace.

You have what it takes. The Lord gave you the personality, the unique gifts and characteristics that you have, because He knew that through your yielding all of that to Him, He could use all that you are and all that you have learned and accomplished to benefit and enrich not only your life, but the lives of many others. He has great plans for you.

Many have overcome difficulties

Here’s an excerpt of a book called Developing the Leader within You by John C. Maxwell.

Many of the Psalms were born in difficulty. Most of the Epistles were written in prison. Most of the greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers of all time had to pass through the fire. Bunyan wrote Pilgrim’s Progress from jail. Florence Nightingale, too ill to move from her bed, reorganized the hospitals of England. Semi-paralyzed and under constant menace of apoplexy, Pasteur was tireless in his attack on disease. During the greater part of his life, American historian Francis Parkman suffered so acutely that he could not work for more than five minutes at a time. His eyesight was so wretched that he could scrawl only a few gigantic words on a manuscript, but he wrote twenty magnificent volumes of history.

Bury a person in the snows of Valley Forge, and you have a George Washington. Raise him in abject poverty, and you have an Abraham Lincoln. Strike him down with infantile paralysis, and he becomes a Franklin D. Roosevelt. Burn him so severely that the doctors say he will never walk again, and you have a Glenn Cunningham, who set the world’s one-mile record in 1934. Have him or her born in a society filled with racial discrimination, and you have a Booker T. Washington, a George Washington Carver, or a Martin Luther King Jr. Call him a slow learner and retarded—writing him off as uneducable—and you have an Albert Einstein.

A study of 300 highly successful people, people like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Helen Keller, Winston Churchill, Albert Schweitzer, Mahatma Gandhi, and Albert Einstein, reveals that one-fourth had handicaps, such as blindness, deafness, or crippled limbs. Three-fourths had either been born in poverty, came from broken homes, or at least came from exceedingly tense or disturbed situations.

Why did the achievers overcome problems while thousands are overwhelmed by theirs? They refused to hold on to the common excuses for failure. They turned their stumbling blocks into stepping stones. They realized they could not determine every circumstance in life, but they could determine their choice of attitude toward every circumstance.

Here’s an excerpt from the book Developing the Leaders around You, also by John. C. Maxwell.

No one, the experts said, would ever be able to run the mile in less than four minutes. Then, in 1954, a young medical student named Roger Bannister did the impossible by breaking that barrier. Today, every world-class runner can run the mile in less than four minutes. Why? Because one man decided to keep improving. One man decided to pay the price of personal growth. He was willing to lead. As a result, he created a climate for those achievers who followed him.

Overcoming obstacles

Maybe you’re discouraged; things aren’t working out for you. Here’s another story of someone who took the major obstacles and difficulties that life threw at him and turned around and used them as stepping stones to success.

In 1938 when Mr. Honda was at school, he took everything that he owned and began working on a special piston ring that he could sell to Toyota.

He labored day and night to create this—often sleeping in his workshop. He even pawned off his wife’s jewelry so that he could stay in business.

When he finally developed the piston ring, he presented it to Toyota and was told that it did not reach their standards. He was sent back to school for two years to improve the design. After this, Toyota gave him a contract.

Then, the Second World War began and he couldn’t get the concrete to build a factory and mass-produce his new design. He and his team created a new type of concrete to build the factory.

Honda’s factory was bombed twice, and he had to rebuild it.When bombs dropped, he and his team picked up the empty shells and called them “gifts from President Truman” because they provided him with the raw materials for his manufacturing process.

Finally, an earthquake leveled his factory and he had to sell his piston operation to Toyota.

After the war, a terrible gasoline shortage hit Japan, and Honda couldn’t even drive his car to get food for his family. So, he then attached a small motor to his bike to help him get around.

Many people asked him to make one for them so they could also have a “motorized bike.” So many asked him that he wanted to open up a factory and make them—but he didn’t have the capital. So he wrote a personal letter to all 18,000 bicycle shops in Japan and told them of his new invention. He convinced 5,000 of them to give him the capital he needed to build his factory.

After modifying the motor, it became an “overnight success,” earning him the Emperor’s Award. Honda today employs over 100,000 people all over the world, all because of Mr. Honda’s commitment to making powerful decisions and not giving up on his goal.

Mr. Honda once said: “Many people dream of success. I believe that success can be achieved only through repeated failure and self-analysis. Success is only one percent of your work, and the rest is bold overcoming of obstacles. If you are not afraid of them, success will come to you itself.” Today’s prosperity of Honda Motor Co. proves the truth of its founder. 1

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”—Viktor Frankl

What choices will you make today to be all you can be?

Roadmap was a video series created by TFI for young adults. Originally published in 2010. Adapted and republished on Anchor January 2020. 

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1 The legendary businessman Soichiro Honda died on August 5, 1991. By the end of his life he came up with a large store of achievements, which were 470 inventions and 150 patents, honorary doctorates at Michigan Technical University and Ohio State University, the highest honor of his country—Japan’s Blue Ribbon—and many other achievements. Starting a business having $3,200, he created a company with an annual revenue of more than $30 billion. (https://astrumpeople.com/soichiro-honda-biography-a-great-history-of-japanese-car-manufacturer.)

Posted in: audio, discipleship, encouragement, failure, learning, other author, perseverance

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Bounce Back From Your Setback

By John C. Maxwell, May 31, 2016:

Do you know any rubber-band people?

Chances are you do. They’re the people who, no matter what happens to them, always seem to bounce back. They may experience an illness, a family tragedy, or a run of bad luck, but it never seems to keep them down. Life can stretch them to their breaking point, but–like a rubber band–they always find a way back to their original shape.

Would you like to know their secret?

Resilience.

Resilience is the ability of an object to return to form after it’s been bent, stretched or compressed. Think about the stress balls you see on some office desks; no matter how hard you squeeze those things, they always return to their original shape. They have resilience.

People can have resilience too. In fact, I’ve been in leadership a long time, and of all the traits I’ve learned as a leader, perhaps none has been as useful to me as resilience. The ability to bounce back from a setback often makes the difference between losing and winning. As the saying goes, you only lose if you quit!

According to the American Psychology Association, there are several key factors in resilience. The first is healthy relationships–having a community of people who love and support you is an important key to bouncing back from disappointment. This, above all, has the most impact on a person’s level of resilience; the larger the network of support and care, the more able a person is to be resilient.

There are other factors as well. The ability to create and execute realistic plans for the future helps minimize the sense of being stuck in our pain. And on those days when you’re tempted to believe you are worthless, the ability to have a positive view of yourself as well as a healthy self-confidence can keep you from falling further into depression. It’s often helpful–and not at all shameful–to talk through problems with a credible counselor. And learning to manage those times when our emotions threaten to overwhelm us plays a huge role in our ability to heal.

But resilience isn’t easy to learn; first of all, the learning process requires something difficult to happen to you. You might lose a business deal. You may develop a devastating illness. You may lose a loved one or a close friend. Second, you have to choose to overcome the setback. That requires a level of personal commitment and discipline. You have to get up every day, face your setback, and determine to not let it beat you.

It’s not an overnight process. In fact, it can take quite a bit of time living on the razor’s edge. But it can be done.

So how do you develop resilience? Here are four ways:

FAIL FORWARD. There is no setback so severe that you cannot recover in some way, but it takes a certain mindset to make that recovery possible. I speak often of failing forward–learning from mistakes in order to become better. That same mindset is critical for resilience. You cannot let your setbacks defeat you; you have to look to them for lessons, along with insights into yourself and your circumstances. It’s hard–especially when the setback is something you didn’t cause–but you can find wisdom in even the most difficult circumstances.

COMMIT TO GROWTH. This is a natural outcome of choosing to fail forward. When you start looking for lessons, you set yourself on a path for personal growth. As you learn about yourself in your struggles, you also learn about the people around you. You begin to reflect on what you want from life, and what it would cost to get you there. The best leaders already have a commitment to personal growth, but it’s easy to lose that drive when life disappoints you. You have to commit again to growing each day–and then focus on getting better one day at a time.

RECOGNIZE THE VALUE OF ADDING VALUE. I have long quoted Zig Ziglar, who said, “If you’ll help others get what they want, they’ll help you get what you want.” Usually when I talk about adding value, I’m inviting people to invest in others, to give in order to help others succeed. But I don’t often talk about the second part of Zig’s statement. There are times in your life when what you need most is for others to add value to you. When you experience a difficult setback, those you’ve invested in will want to return the favor. Let them. Let the value you’ve given to others return to you and help you through your dark hours. You’ll emerge stronger–and more committed to adding value to others in the future.

FIND STRENGTH BEYOND YOURSELF. I’m going to address an area that may not be of interest to some readers. If that’s true of you, you can still take away a lot of value from my previous points, and I hope you do. But for me, when things get to their most difficult, there is only one place for me to turn–and that’s to God. Sometimes life is filled with challenges that stretch us so far that we fear we may never snap back. You may find yourself struggling to make sense of your emotions, your thoughts, your very place in this world. Times like these require more than human strength. In the dark moments, I encourage you, bring your pain to God. He knows not only how to comfort you, but to bring you through the pain and into a new and better life. And if you reach out to Him, He will bring you through.

Life has no shortage of difficulties, but the good news is that no matter how difficult things may get, you can bounce back. That’s the beauty of resilience. No matter how many setbacks you’ve faced in your life, it’s never too late to cultivate resilience. You too can grow to become a “rubber-band person,” someone who bounces back from setbacks every time.

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Maturity Is the Result of Learning to Feed the Right Emotions

By John C. Maxwell, Leadership Wired, October 4, 2013

Many years ago I came across a verse that I feel accurately describes the human condition. It says,

Two natures beat within my breast.
The one is foul, the other blessed.
The one I love, the other I hate,
The one I feed will dominate.

I believe both positive and negative emotions are contained within each of us. There are people who teach that we should try to eliminate all negative feelings from our lives, but I have never been able to do that. I have tried, but I found that I simply can’t. However, what I can do is feed the positive thoughts until they become dominant over the negative ones.

It’s said that General George Patton, a fearless warrior of the U.S. Army during World War II, thought of himself as anything but brave. When an official praised his acts of heroism, Patton’s response was,

"Sir, I am not a brave man. The truth of the matter is I am usually a coward at heart. I have never been in the sound of gunshot or sight of battle in my whole life that I was not afraid. I constantly have sweat on my palms and a lump in my throat." How was someone so afraid able to be so brave? He fed the right emotions. Or as Patton put it himself: "I learned very early in life not to take counsel of my fears."

I try to feed the right emotions within myself by acting on the emotion that I want to win. “Do something every day that you don’t want to do,” advised author Mark Twain. “This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.” Acting on the right emotion will lift you to success. Acting on the wrong emotion will lower you to failure.

I once had lunch with Dom Capers, the successful NFL coach. One of the things he said during our conversation was, “Maturity is doing what you are supposed to be doing, when you’re supposed to be doing it, no matter how you feel.” That’s true. The key to success is action. Too often we want to feel our way into acting, when instead we need to act our way into feeling. If we do the right thing, we will eventually feel the right feelings.

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