Our willingness to experience failure and make mistakes affects our ability to succeed. If we stand on the sidelines without trying, we may escape the heartache of defeat, but we’ll never know the joy of accomplishment. If we’re willing to stumble and sometimes even fall, we’ll learn, grow, and become strong.
One hundred and forty years ago, Theodore Roosevelt was a frail, nearsighted child, tormented by near-fatal asthma attacks. As a teenager, he worked to overcome his ill health through rigorous exercise, weight-lifting, and boxing. When he was in his 20s, his wife and mother passed away on the same day, leaving him heartbroken. After college he entered politics, winning and losing elections over the next decades.
Through it all, he maintained a zest for life. He went on to become the youngest person ever to serve as president of the United States; he won the Nobel Peace Prize; and today, his image is carved on the massive granite of South Dakota’s Black Hills.
Although Theodore Roosevelt’s life may be larger than ours, like each of us he was no stranger to life’s ups and downs. We all make mistakes; we all face setbacks and experience our share of sorrow. But somehow, someway, we can decide not to give up. Every failure can lead to success, as long as we keep trying.
As Roosevelt said: “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”1 We see past that gray twilight whenever we keep trying, go forward, and take even one small step of faith.
Program #4017
1 In Justin Kaplan, ed., Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 17th ed. (2002), 614–15.