Success Being Limited By Fear of Failure

Here's an interesting insight from the Maverick Spirit that discusses going against conformaty to achieve success...

The only surviving member company of the original twelve members of the Dow Jones Industrial Average was founded by someone who was asked to leave school because his teachers complained that he was “addled or scatterbrained.”

Of course we are talking about Thomas Edison and the invention of the modern light bulb, and the company he founded is General Electric which remains one of the most powerful companies in the World.

With horror I read today’s newspaper that we are intending to test 5 year olds on how they rate for education and I wonder whether people like Edison, Einstein, Gates, Jobs and our own Kerry Stokes of Channel 7 fame, would fair now.

Nearly without exception, failing miserably is a prerequisite for OUTRAGEOUS success. In fact the fear of failure stops many even trying.

I remember being asked a number of years ago by a colleague, “If you believe in this stuff, why don’t we do it?” My answer was… “It mightn’t work!” To which the reply was… “Who would know?”

Are you limiting your chance of success because you are afraid of failing?

Worst still, are you committing your children to a life of safe secure jobs by having them conform to a system that is designed to train them for jobs that already don’t exist, or at the very least have been exported to China or India.

It’s time to challenge what we believe to be true… and I believe it is not testing 5 year olds to see whether they are good enough to pushed into a system designed to consign them to a life a average results in secure jobs that may or may not exist in 2 or 5 or 10 years time.

What we need is to encourage more Thomas Edisions who on 1.015 attempts created what we know now as the modern light bulb.

- Wayne Mansfield