by: Howard E. Butt Jr.
If you pay attention to business failures, you may start to perceive what some call “dead ends onto right paths.” Here are a few Harvey McKay gave in his classic business book:
1) Walt Disney was once fired by a newspaper. For what? For lack of ideas.
2) MGM’s memo after Fred Astaire’s screen test said: Can’t act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.
3) Beethoven’s violin teacher declared him hopeless as a composer.
This is Howard Butt, Jr., of Laity Lodge. If that list of dead ends doesn’t encourage you, have someone check your pulse. Failures do not a career UN-make. On the contrary: A dead end is your signal to make a RIGHT turn . . . into the high calling of our daily work.
How Failure is a Part of Life
by: Andy Crouch
I've come to realize that all creativity leads through failure . . . takes you through failure. And some creativity leads you to failure; you just end up in failure. So all creativity requires the willingness to fail, and I don't know any creative endeavor where you don't fail before you succeed . . . at least when you're learning. But as you go on in that field, if you are doing what you're meant to do, the demands get bigger and bigger. The levels of failure that you have to contemplate or go through to get to success get greater and greater. Paul ends up at the end of his life writing, and he says, "Almost everyone I trusted has deserted me." He writes to Timothy and says, "Please come visit me." At that moment in his life—and his life is about to fail, be cut off by the Roman Empire—he looks at most of what he's done and says it's deserted. So the calling to the creative life, to the culture making life is not a calling to more and more clearer success. It's a calling to more and more creativity, which may or may not succeed. All of which is going to put you at risk for failing, and all of which then has to be put in the hands of God.
