Quote of the Week...from Winston Churchill

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.  
                                                                     ----Winston Churchill

Because President's Day is coming up...between the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington...I was tempted to select a former president for this week's quote.  But then I saw the above saying of the great twentieth century British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and I changed my mind...because, like other quotes on this blog, it seemed pretty profound...

There is a "counterquote" to the above, one of W.C. Fields' most famous comedic lines: "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it." Well, for many things it is this quote of Fields that applies, and for a few it's a good idea to heed Churchill.  After all, in any challenging ongoing endeavor the underlying motivation for it is crucial as to whether, when confronted with repeated failures, I can maintain my enthusiasm for the project or lose interest for lack of positive feedback.  Sometimes after all, we can choose to pursue something unwisely and we need to have an inner mechanism that allows us to see the "writing on the wall" and change our focus to something else that dovetails with where we want to go.  On the other hand, experiencing failures, especially at the beginning of an undertaking, can serve by itself as an excuse for quitting.  Just be aware that, like anything else in life, failures can serve as lessons for improvement or signals to change what you're doing to something else.  There's nothing inherently wrong in changing your mind as to what you want to do...in a way, that's learning from failures as well.  But Winston Churchill's quote looks back from the vantage point of having been successful...and that view sees that success as having been built upon a foundation of many, many failures...each one providing instruction and direction to the ultimate goal...