Benefits of Failure & Importance of Imagination
The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination
Highlights:
- Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.
- "Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me."
- Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
- What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.
- "Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment."
"...failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive..."
- You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default
- The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.
- Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
- In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it (Imagination) is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
- We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
Highlights:
- Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.
- "Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me."
- Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
- What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.
- "Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment."
"...failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive..."
- You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default
- The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.
- Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
- In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it (Imagination) is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
- We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
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on Tuesday, July 01, 2008 at 2:06 am.
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