Failure

21 March 2014 ~ Question of the Day ~ Definition of Failure

What is your definition of failure?
Do you consider yourself a failure?

Failure is not getting up and trying again.
Ultimately, failure is death.
I’m still breathing, haven’t failed yet!

[followed by]

Hi Muse

I can’t agree with you more.
If freedom has any meaning at all, it must include the freedom to make mistakes, limited only by the likely consequences of those mistakes on themselves or others. So it you see someone playing with a loaded gin, and looking down the barrel while playing with the trigger, it is fully acceptable to tell them to stop what they are doing. Anything much less than that becomes a balance of guesswork and judgement.

And in learning, some things are far more forgiving than other things.
Like when I was practising a particularly tricky short field landing technique, I first did so on top of a flat cloud, so that if I made a mistake, all that happened was I fell through a cloud and continue flying.
After getting it right 30 times in a row, I was confident to try in landing on real dirt – but with a lot of spare runway. After 30 successes on that, I was ready to land on a strip only 300ft long on top of a cliff that was mostly covered by tree canopy. You had to commit, there was no possibility of a plan B.