learning on Failure

“We learn from failure, not from success!”

One of the reasons failure can be so crushing is that we set goals of success, instead of improvement and learning.

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

When people fail, we are inclined to find fault with them, but if you look more closely, you will find that God had some particular truth for them to learn, which the trouble they are in is to teach t...

Tom Watson, Sr., is the man who founded IBM. You can imagine the money, the investments, the experiments, this man, and his multi-billion dollar company have made through the years. Once, years ago, w...

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.

IDENTITY AND SUFFERING The key to understanding today’s readings lies in the first half of 1 Peter. Two themes dominate Peter’s encouragement to these early Christians: identity and suffering. Knowi...

A Note of Understanding The Lectionary and the Liturgical Calendar Preaching from the lectionary isn’t always easy. When the assigned texts align with major moments in the liturgical calendar—Christ...

I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and failures. . . . I divide the world into learners and nonlearners.

A stumble may prevent a fall.

If a mistake is not a stepping stone, it is a mistake.

We cannot afford to forget any experience, not even the most painful.

Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not se...

If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly t...

Change is the end result of all true learning.

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

At eighteen, a self-assured Benjamin Franklin returned to Boston, the city he had fled just seven months earlier. Dressed in a fine new suit, with a watch on his wrist and a pocket full of coins, he p...

Experience is overrated. Some people say they have twenty years’ experience, when, in reality, they only have one year’s experience, repeated twenty times.

Faith does not grow in spite of suffering, but through suffering, when hope learns to contradict reality.

Any fool can learn from his mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.

Suffering is a dreadful teacher but often the beginning of the best in us. Suffering and creativity arc often interdependent. Pain produces a terrible tension released in our creative response. Suffer...

Repetitio mater studiorum est. (Repetition is the mother of learning.)

Today is Yesterday's Pupil.

The point of discourse is to learn with and from one another. I used to tell my students that at least 20 percent of what I was telling them was wrong, but I didn't know which 20 percent it was: I...

God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons we could not learn in any other way.

Nothing ever becomes real till experienced – even a proverb is no proverb until your life has illustrated it.

I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.

You know there is a problem with the education system when you realize that out of the 3 R’s only one begins with an R.

The late comedian Sam Levenson enjoyed sharing funny anecdotes about his childhood, especially his early school days. One of his favorite stories was about his first day of school, when his overly pro...

Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.