achievement on Learning from Your Mistakes

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

“If one wants to be active, one mustn’t be afraid to do something wrong sometimes, not afraid to lapse into some mistakes. To be good — many people think that they’ll achieve it by doing no harm — and...

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.

In his book, Scary Close , Donald Miller acknowledges that over time he developed a mask, or a persona that kept even those closest to him from experiencing with him. As he began to peel back layers ...

But all at once I realized that it was not my success God had used to enable me to help those in this prison, or in hundreds of others just like it. My life of success was not what made this morning s...

Is life not full of opportunities for learning love? Every man and woman every day has a thousand of them. The world is not a playground; it is a schoolroom. Life is not a holiday, but an education. A...

Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.

The Double Helix, James Watson’s 1968 memoir about discovering the structure of DNA, describes the roller coaster of emotions he and Francis Crick experienced through the progress and setbacks of the ...

Sailing at a Snail's Pace 0.33 miles per hour. That’s about how fast the disciples were going as they tried to haul their boat across the water with the wind against them. The disciples had proba...

Preaching Commentary Sailing at a Snail's Pace 0.33 miles per hour. That’s about how fast the disciples were going as they tried to haul their boat across the water with the wind against them. ...

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather have these because we have acted rightly; these virtues are formed in man by d...

When Bob Dylan was recording Blood on the Tracks – possibly the single greatest album in popular music history – he had to deal with a junior recording engineer who “explained” to him that he was goin...

Harold Kushner wrote about a very bright, driven pre-med student at a very competitive college. While traveling in the East the summer before his junior year, he met a guru who said, “Don’t you see yo...

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the ar...

The way you think determines the way you feel, and the way you feel determines the way you act.

People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all themselves. But in fact they are invariably the benefici...

William James, in a famous letter to H. G. Wells in 1906, credited what he called American “moral flabbiness” to “the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That—with the squalid cash interpr...

All of us struggle with our own desires for accomplishment and ambition. Christians especially find it difficult to discern their own worldly ambitions vs. following Jesus’ comand to seek first the ki...

I suspect that this is the most important thing I’ve said in all my interviews and talks as well as in this book. It’s a truth that applies to more than writing. It applies to anything that is importa...

In Jeremiah it is clear that the excellence comes from a life of faith, from being more interested in God than in self, and has almost nothing to do with comfort or esteem or achievement. Here is a pe...

There are two tragedies in lie. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.

Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness.

If you were to travel back in time to the city of Rome (either during the Republic or the Empire), you may have had the opportunity to witness the Triumph, a colossal spectacle in which the greatest m...

Many economic fallacies are due to conceiving of economic activity as a zero-sum contest, in which what is gained by one is lost by another. This in turn is often due to ignoring the fact that wealth ...

Achievement is the alcohol of our time.

Qui cessat esse melior cessat esse bonus (He who ceases to be better ceases to be good)

With vainglory, we crave notice of our achievements with pride, we take full credit for the progress we have made and do not think that God has been involved at all, let alone been our indispensible h...

Lord Nelson once said that all his achievements in life came down to one simple habit: he was always there a quarter of an hour early, never a quarter of an hour late.

Thomas Merton describes those who never experience the gift of a contemplative life. His explanation for why some people never experience this can be found in his book, New Seeds of Contemplation: [T...

None climbs so high as he who knows not whither he is going.