PrintHOW TO FAIL SUCCESSFULLY
by Mike Robinson
Some time back I wandered through a large bookshop. I was simply browsing with no particular thoughts about buying a book. It slowly dawned on me that there are available to us today a huge number of "How To" books that promise to make us successful in just about any field of endeavour you care to name.
We really are a success-orientated society, aren't we? It's no wonder there are so few people around who know how to fail successfully. Although I can't dogmatically say there aren't any books on "How To Be A Successful Failure", I certainly couldn't find any that day!
Think about it. It takes a pretty rare kind of person who will undertake a project, subsequently fail, learn from the failure and then make it work for their ultimate good and the good of others.
There are few fears in our world as crippling as the fear of failure. For some people, that fear can paralyse their motivation and initiative so effectively that they attempt nothing and, therefore, achieve nothing. And that decision may just be the greatest failure of all.
Of course, there are people who are driven by a fear of failure to attempt just about everything in the hope that they will succeed at something! Likewise, there are people who are very successful in some areas but are haunted by the sense of failure in the areas of life, love and relationships that really count.
Years ago, there was a man who was executed in his mid-life. He and His movement must have appeared to have been the ultimate failures. He was ridiculed in death and pronounced a fraud. His little band of followers were initially scattered and a movement that promised so much produced so little. A failure by any standard. The man? Jesus Christ.
The unexpected twist to the story was that what the human race considered to be ignominious failure was declared by Almighty God to be the greatest "success story" of all time and eternity.
Things aren't always what they seem to be. If God says I'm not a failure, every other standard of measuring failure doesn't really matter, does it?
