If Politicians Were Farmers

I was having breakfast with my 85-year-old mother the other day and she said the greatest thing. She paid close attention to both political conventions this year and told me that if these guys were farmers, they’d have no crops to sell.

What she means is that our two presidential candidates (let’s be honest, we really only have two options) are all talk and no do. If they were farmers they wouldn’t get any crops in the ground and we’d all starve to death. And yet they’re going to lead our country. Do we need to do some redesigning here folks?

[Image from here]

Failure: It’s an asset, not a setback

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The difference between all of us and the late Steve Jobs is that he looked at failure as an asset; most everyone else views it as a setback. Even worse, some of us let failures define us (i.e., “I am a failure”).

When you consider failure a form of education, your greatest ideas will come to fruition. Jobs went through failure after failure before we all came to depend on his iPhone or iPod. It was with each failure that he analyzed what went wrong, and only then was he able to find out what consumers really needed and desired.

When you look at failure as an asset, it won’t dampen your desire to succeed. Instead, you will grow from it. The truth is simple: If you want success, you must value your failures. In fact the greatest failure of all is not to learn from your failures.