Category: Inspiration

Everyone knows her as the giggling ’dumb blonde’ from the 1960s who won an Oscar at 23—but almost nobody knows she quietly built a brain science program that’s now taught emotional resilience to 6 million children in 48 countries.

In 1968, when Goldie Hawn appeared on TV covered in body paint and a bikini, giggling her way through comedy sketches as the show’s ditzy blonde, a women’s magazine editor confronted her. “Don’t you feel terrible that you’re playing a dumb blonde?” the editor asked.

“While women are fighting for liberation, you’re reinforcing every stereotype. ”

Goldie’s response was immediate: “I don’t understand that question because I’m already liberated. Liberation comes from the inside.”

At twenty-two, Goldie Hawn understood something that would define her entire life: you don’t have to play by anyone else’s rules to be free. You just have to know who you are. And she did.

Born in Washington, D.C., Goldie grew up training seriously as a ballet dancer—a discipline requiring precision, control, and relentless self-awareness. When she transitioned to comedy, those skills came with her. Her persona on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In was carefully crafted: the giggling go-go dancer delivering punchlines through high-pitched laughter.

She became a 1960s “It Girl” almost overnight. But what looked like spontaneous silliness was actually masterful comedic craft. Her giggle wasn’t random—it was strategic. Her wide-eyed innocence wasn’t naivete—it was performance. She played the dumb blonde so well that people missed the intelligence underneath. And that was exactly the point. In 1969, Goldie won both the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress for Cactus Flower.

She was twenty-three years old. Her film career exploded. But by the late 1970s, Goldie recognized an uncomfortable truth: actresses, no matter how successful, rarely controlled their own narratives.

So she became a producer. In 1980, she co-produced Private Benjamin with friend Nancy Meyers. Studios dismissed it as “too female,“ predicting audiences wouldn’t pay to see a woman’s story about independence. Goldie ignored them.

Private Benjamin became a massive box office hit and earned three Oscar nominations. She continued producing and starring in successful comedies throughout the 1980s and 1990s, crafting characters who laughed at their own pain and weaponized humor against aging and sexism.

But offscreen, something even more remarkable was happening. While her peers chased youth through surgery and desperate career moves, Goldie turned inward. She’d been meditating since the 1970s, long before mindfulness became trendy.

She studied neuroscience, positive psychology, and how the brain works. This wasn’t celebrity dabbling. This was serious, sustained study. And in 2003, it led to what might be Goldie’s most important work.

Alarmed by increases in school violence, youth depression and suicide, Goldie founded The Goldie Hawn Foundation. Working with leading neuroscientists and educators, the foundation developed MindUP—an evidence-based curriculum teaching children social-emotional skills and mindfulness.

MindUP teaches children how their brains work, how to manage stress through “brain breaks,“ how to regulate emotions, build empathy, and develop resilience.

The program is based on actual neuroscience. Research has shown that students using MindUP demonstrate improved focus, increased empathy, better academic performance, and higher levels of optimism.

“If students take two minutes for a brain break three times a day,” Goldie explained, “optimism in the classroom goes up almost 80 percent. ”The program has now served over 6 million children in 48 countries. Read that again: 6 million children.

48 countries. The “dumb blonde” from the 1960s quietly built a global program that’s teaching emotional resilience to millions of kids—many of whom have no idea who Goldie Hawn even is.

This work—sustained, focused on children most people in Hollywood never think about—might be Goldie’s most enduring legacy. Throughout all of this, she’s maintained remarkable stability.

She’s been with Kurt Russell since 1983—over forty years together without marrying. She raised four children who’ve pursued their own careers with her support.

Now in her late seventies, Goldie remains selective about her projects. She took a fifteen-year break from film, returning in 2017 for Snatched with Amy Schumer—who had grown up watching Goldie’s films and wanted to work with her. When asked about ageism in Hollywood, Goldie’s response was characteristically pragmatic: “You think you’re going to fight the system? Anger doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s not productive.”

Instead of fighting battles she couldn’t win, she changed the battlefield. She produced. She built a foundation. She taught millions of children. She lived life on her own terms.

Looking back, Goldie Hawn’s life reveals a consistent pattern: she never let anyone else define her worth. When critics dismissed her as a dumb blonde, she won an Oscar. When Hollywood tried to limit her to acting, she became a producer.

When fame threatened to consume her, she turned to meditation and neuroscience. When she saw children struggling, she built a global program to help them.

The giggle that made her famous was never the whole story. It was the disguise that let her do everything else. Goldie Hawn proved that you don’t have to shout to be powerful. You don’t have to reject femininity to be feminist.

And you don’t have to choose between success and substance—you can have both, as long as you know who you are. She smiled her way through a system designed to limit her, then quietly built an empire that had nothing to do with that system’s approval.

6 million children in 48 countries have learned emotional resilience from a program created by the woman America knew as the giggling blonde in a bikini. That’s not just a career. That’s a masterclass in playing the long game.

Because the greatest act of resistance isn’t fighting the stereotype. It’s using it as cover while you do the real work. And Goldie Hawn has been doing the real work for more than fifty years.

(Tom: We all owe this being a debt of thanks!)

He discovered how old the Earth was. Then he discovered something that could destroy us all.

For thousands of years, humanity wondered about the age of our planet. Religious texts offered one answer. Philosophers debated another. Scientists made educated guesses based on fossils and rock layers. But nobody actually knew.

Until a quiet scientist named Clair Patterson figured it out in 1953.

He should have become instantly famous. His name should have appeared in every textbook. Instead, what he discovered next turned him into a target. He found himself standing alone against one of the most powerful industries on Earth, fighting a battle that would determine whether millions of children would grow up with damaged minds.

And for decades, almost nobody knew his name.

Patterson’s journey began in the late 1940s at the University of Chicago. He was a young geochemist with an impossible assignment: measure the precise amount of lead isotopes in a meteorite fragment called Canyon Diablo.

The theory was elegant—if he could measure these specific lead ratios accurately, he could calculate when the solar system formed, and therefore, when Earth was born.

But there was a problem that nearly broke him.

Every time he tried to measure the lead in his samples, the numbers were wildly inconsistent. One day high, the next day higher, never stable. His equipment seemed fine. His calculations were correct. Yet the data was chaos.

Most scientists would have given up or blamed the methodology. Patterson was different. He possessed an almost obsessive attention to detail and patience that bordered on stubborn madness.

One day, he realized something shocking: the problem wasn’t his rock sample. The problem was everything else.

There was lead everywhere. On the lab benches. In the air. Tracking in on people’s shoes. Floating as invisible dust particles. The entire world was contaminated, and it was sabotaging his measurements.

So Patterson did something unprecedented. He built the world’s first ultra-clean laboratory.

He scrubbed every surface until his hands bled. He sealed cracks in walls with tape. He installed specialized air filters. He made his assistants wear protective suits and wash repeatedly before entering. For years, he cleaned and refined and eliminated every possible source of contamination.

Finally, in 1953, he achieved it. He got a clean reading. He ran the numbers through a mass spectrometer, performed the calculations, and suddenly held an answer that no human in history had ever known:

4.55 billion years.

The Earth was 4.55 billion years old.

It’s said that in his excitement, he drove straight to his mother’s house in Iowa and told her he’d solved one of humanity’s oldest mysteries. The weight of not knowing had finally lifted.

But while building his clean room, Patterson had stumbled onto something far more disturbing.

Where was all this lead coming from?

Lead is naturally rare on Earth’s surface. It stays locked deep underground in mineral deposits. It doesn’t float freely in the air. It doesn’t coat laboratory tables. Yet it was everywhere—in quantities that made no sense.

Patterson began testing the world outside his lab. Ocean water. Mountain snow. Everywhere he looked, lead levels were hundreds of times higher than natural background levels.

And then he understood.

Since the 1920s, oil companies had been adding a compound called tetraethyl lead to gasoline. It prevented engine knock and made cars run smoother. But every car on every road was functioning as a poison dispersal system, spraying microscopic lead particles into the air with every mile driven.

Lead is a neurotoxin. It damages developing brains. It lowers IQ. It causes behavioral problems, aggression, and cognitive impairment. And an entire generation of children was breathing it every single day.

Patterson had to make a choice.

He was a geochemist. His job was studying rocks and isotopes, not fighting corporations or advocating for public health. He had stable funding and a promising academic career. He could have simply published his Earth-age discovery and moved on to the next project.

But he couldn’t unsee what he’d found.

In the mid-1960s, he published papers warning that industrial lead contamination was poisoning the environment and harming human health.

The response was swift and brutal.

The lead industry was massive, wealthy, and had no intention of losing billions in revenue. Their chief scientific defender was Dr. Robert Kehoe, who had spent decades assuring the public that environmental lead was natural and harmless. Kehoe was polished, well-funded, and had the backing of powerful corporations.

When Patterson challenged this narrative, the industry attempted to buy his silence. Representatives visited him offering generous research grants and institutional support. All he had to do was redirect his focus elsewhere.

Patterson refused.

So they tried to destroy him professionally.

His funding from petroleum-connected sources was immediately cut. The industry pressured his university to dismiss him. They used their influence to block his papers from peer-reviewed journals. They publicly dismissed him as an overzealous geologist stepping outside his expertise.

For years, it worked. Patterson was marginalized, labeled an alarmist, and isolated from mainstream scientific discussions.

But Patterson had something the industry couldn’t counter: evidence from before the contamination began.

He realized he needed a time machine—a way to prove what Earth’s atmosphere was like before automobiles. So he traveled to one of the most remote places on the planet: Greenland.

In brutal, freezing conditions, Patterson and his team drilled deep into ancient glaciers, extracting long cylinders of ice. These ice cores were frozen time capsules. Snow that fell in 1700 was preserved deep in the ice. Snow from 1900 was higher up. Snow from the 1950s was near the surface.

Back in his clean lab, Patterson carefully melted layers of ice from different time periods and measured their lead content.

The results were devastating to the industry’s claims.

For thousands of years, atmospheric lead levels were essentially zero. Then, starting precisely in the 1920s—exactly when leaded gasoline was introduced—the levels shot upward like a rocket. The graph was unmistakable. The contamination wasn’t natural. It was recent, man-made, and accelerating.

Armed with this irrefutable proof, Patterson returned to the fight.

He testified before congressional committees, sitting across from industry lawyers who tried to confuse the science. He wasn’t comfortable with public speaking.

He was nervous, awkward, and preferred the quiet predictability of his laboratory. But he refused to back down.

He told legislators they were poisoning their own children. He showed them the ice core data. He made the invisible visible.

Slowly, reluctantly, the truth broke through.

Other scientists began supporting his findings. Public health advocates took notice. Parents started demanding action. The tide turned.

In the 1970s, the United States passed the Clean Air Act and began the slow process of removing lead from gasoline. It took years of regulatory battles, but eventually, unleaded gasoline became the standard.

The results were nothing short of miraculous.

Within years, blood lead levels in American children dropped by nearly 80%. An entire generation was saved from cognitive impairment, behavioral disorders, and reduced intelligence. Millions of lives were protected from lead-related health problems.

Clair Patterson had won.

Yet when he died in 1995, few outside the scientific community knew his name. He never received a Nobel Prize. He never became wealthy. He simply returned to his laboratory and continued studying the chemistry of the oceans and the history of the Earth.

Patterson’s story is a reminder of what integrity looks like when nobody’s watching.

It’s easy to do the right thing when the crowd is cheering. It’s infinitely harder when powerful interests are trying to ruin you, when your career is threatened, when taking the money would be so much easier.

He could have stayed silent. He could have enjoyed a comfortable, well-funded career studying rocks while children’s minds were damaged. He could have said, “Not my problem.”

But he looked at the data, looked at the world, and decided truth mattered more than comfort.

He gave us the age of the Earth—a number that changed our understanding of time itself.

And then he gave us a future—a world where children could grow up without poison in their lungs.

We often imagine heroes as soldiers, activists, or celebrities. But sometimes a hero is just a stubborn man in a white lab coat, scrubbing a floor over and over, refusing to accept a convenient lie.

He cleaned the room.

And then he cleaned the world.

Mark Twain tears apart the myth of education as obedience.
A diploma proves you followed instructions.
A grade proves you memorized the map.
Neither proves you understand the territory.
Schools produce workers who know how to comply.
Curiosity produces minds that know how to think.
Twain’s warning is sharp: intelligence is not measured by how well you pass tests — it’s measured by how well you question them.

“The key to success is going to bed a little smarter each day.” Warren Buffett – Investor (born 1930)

She found out her show was cancelled by overhearing executives on an elevator—they didn’t even know she was standing behind them.

In 1963, Shari Lewis was one of the most talented performers in television.

She could sing. She could dance. She could conduct a symphony orchestra. She could perform ventriloquism so precisely that audiences forgot they were watching a woman with a sock on her hand.

She had trained at the American School of Ballet. Studied acting with Sanford Meisner. Learned piano at two years old. Won a Peabody Award. Hosted a show that ran live television without error—week after week, year after year.

And NBC executives decided she was replaceable.

They cancelled The Shari Lewis Show to make room for cartoons.

She wasn’t told directly. She learned about it while standing in an elevator, listening to men in suits discuss the decision as if she wasn’t there.

“All of it… my entire field crashed around my ears,” she said later.

The industry had made its position clear: children’s television was filler. If the audience was young, the work didn’t count. And the woman who created that work? She was a novelty. A mascot. Not an artist.

But here’s what they got wrong about Shari Lewis:

She didn’t need their permission.

When American networks abandoned live children’s programming, Lewis moved to England and hosted a show on the BBC for eight years. When that work dried up, she performed in Las Vegas casinos, touring companies of Broadway shows, and appeared on variety programs with Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson.

When those opportunities faded, she reinvented herself again.

She became one of the few female symphony conductors in the world—performing with over 100 orchestras, including the national symphonies of the United States, Canada, and Japan. She learned to speak Japanese for her performances there.

Once, she walked onto a stage at a state fair and found only four people in the audience.

She did the show anyway.

That was who Shari Lewis was.

Not a puppet act. Not a children’s entertainer waiting for permission. A performer who controlled timing, voice, pacing, and audience attention with surgical precision—and refused to stop working just because an industry decided she wasn’t serious.

Then, nearly 30 years after that elevator conversation, PBS came calling.

In 1992, at 59 years old, Lewis launched Lamb Chop’s Play-Along.

The show won five consecutive Emmy Awards. It was the first children’s program in seven years to beat Sesame Street for a writing Emmy. A new generation of children fell in love with Lamb Chop, Charlie Horse, and Hush Puppy—the same characters executives had declared “outdated” three decades earlier.

The audience hadn’t moved on. The industry had simply stopped paying attention.

Lewis didn’t treat this as a comeback. She treated it as what it always was: a correction.

She testified before Congress in 1993 to advocate for children’s television. Lamb Chop was granted special permission to speak. When elementary schools started cutting music programs, Lewis created The Charlie Horse Music Pizza to teach children about music through entertainment.

She was still innovating. Still refusing to be small.

In June 1998, Lewis was diagnosed with uterine cancer and given six weeks to live. She was in the middle of taping new episodes.

She finished them anyway.

Her final performance was a song called “Hello, Goodbye.” Her crew held back tears as she sang. She was saying goodbye to them, to the children watching, and to the character who had been her partner for over 40 years.

Shari Lewis died on August 2, 1998. She was 65 years old.

The industry remembered her fondly. It always does when it’s too late.

But her work didn’t need their remembrance. It endured on its own terms—passed down from parents to children, from one generation to the next, because the audience always knew what the executives never understood:

Precision is not small just because it serves children.

Craft is not diminished by joy.

And the woman who made a sock puppet come alive was never the novelty.

She was the reason it worked at all.

The wooden box had three metallic wheels.

It looked like a toy, or perhaps a piece of scrap assembled in a garage, but the man holding it believed it was the key to the human mind.

It was December 9, 1968.

In the cavernous Brooks Hall in San Francisco, more than a thousand of the world’s top computer scientists sat in folding chairs, waiting. They were used to the roar of air conditioning units cooling massive mainframes. They were used to the smell of ozone and the stack of stiff paper punch cards that defined their working lives.

They were not used to Douglas Engelbart.

He sat alone on the stage, wearing a headset that looked like it belonged to a pilot, staring at a screen that flickered with a ghostly green light. Behind the scenes, a team of engineers held their breath, praying that the delicate web of wires and microwave signals they had cobbled together would hold for just ninety minutes.

If it worked, it would change how humanity thought.

If it failed, Douglas Engelbart would simply be the man who wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on a fantasy.

The world of 1968 was analog.

Information lived on paper. If you wanted to change a paragraph in a report, you retyped the entire page. If you wanted to send a document to a colleague in another city, you put it in an envelope and waited three days. If you wanted to calculate a trajectory, you gave a stack of cards to an operator, who fed them into a machine the size of a room, and you came back the next day for the results.

Computers were calculators. They were powerful, loud, and distant. They were owned by institutions, guarded by specialists, and kept behind glass walls. The idea that a single person would sit in front of a screen and “interact” with a computer in real-time was not just technically difficult; it was culturally absurd.

Engelbart, a soft-spoken engineer from Oregon, saw it differently.

He had grown up in the Depression, fixing water pumps and electrical lines. He understood tools. He believed that the problems facing humanity—war, poverty, disease—were becoming too complex for the unassisted human brain to solve. We needed better tools. We needed to “augment human intellect.”

For years, he had run a lab at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). While others focused on making computers faster at math, Engelbart’s team focused on making them responsive. They built systems that allowed a user to point, click, and see results instantly.

They called their system NLS, or the “oN-Line System.”

It was a radical departure from the status quo. To the establishment, computing was serious business involving batch processing and efficiency. Engelbart was talking about “manipulating symbols” and “collaboration.”

The pressure on Engelbart was immense.

The funding for his Augmentation Research Center came from ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency), the same government body responsible for military technology. They had poured significant resources into his vision, but results were hard to quantify. There were no enemy codes broken, no missile trajectories calculated. Just a group of men in California moving text around on a screen.

The critics were loud. They called him a dreamer. They said his ideas were “pie in the sky.” Why would anyone need to see a document on a screen when typewriters worked perfectly fine? Why would anyone need to point at data?

This presentation was his answer.

It was an all-or-nothing gamble.

To make the demonstration work, Engelbart wasn’t just using a computer on the stage. The machine itself—an SDS 940 mainframe—was thirty miles away in Menlo Park. He was controlling it remotely.

His team had leased two video lines from the telephone company, a massive expense and logistical nightmare. They had set up microwave transmitters on the roof of the civic center and on a truck parked on a ridge line to relay the signal.

In 1968, sending a video signal and a data signal simultaneously over thirty miles to a live audience was the equivalent of a moon landing.

The computer industry was built on a specific, rigid logic.
Computing Logic: Computers are scarce, expensive resources. Human time is cheap; computer time is expensive. Therefore, humans must prepare work offline (punch cards) to maximize the machine’s efficiency. Interactive computing wastes the machine’s time.

This logic governed the industry. It was why IBM was a titan. It was why office workers sat in rows with typewriters. It was the “correct“ way to do things.

It worked perfectly—until it met Douglas Engelbart.

Engelbart believed that human time was the precious resource, not the machine’s. He believed the machine should serve the mind, even if it was “inefficient” for the hardware.

As the lights went down in Brooks Hall, the hum of the crowd faded.

Engelbart looked small on the big stage. The screen behind him, a massive projection of his small monitor, glowed into life.

He spoke into his microphone, his voice steady but quiet.

“If in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display, backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day, and was instantly responsive to every action you had, how much value could you derive from that?”

It was a question nobody had ever asked.

He moved his right hand.

On the massive screen, a small dot moved.

The audience froze.

He wasn’t typing coordinates. He wasn’t entering a command code. He was simply moving his hand, and the digital ghost on the screen followed him. He was using the wooden box with the wheels—the device his team had nicknamed “the mouse” because the cord looked like a tail.

Today, a cursor moving on a screen is as natural as breathing. In 1968, it was magic.

But he didn’t stop there.

He clicked on a word. It was highlighted.

He deleted it. It vanished.

The text around it snapped shut to fill the gap.

A murmur ran through the hall. He wasn’t rewriting the page. He
was manipulating information as if it were a physical object, yet it was made of light.

He showed them a “grocery list.” He categorized items. He collapsed the list so only the headers showed, then expanded it again to show the details.

He called this “view control.” We call it windowing.

He showed them a map. He clicked a link, and the screen jumped to a detailed diagram of a component. He clicked back, and he was at the map again.

He called it “hypermedia.” We call it the internet.

The demonstration continued, each minute adding a new impossibility to the list.

The tension in the control room was suffocating. Every second the system stayed online was a victory against the laws of probability. A single blown fuse, a misaligned microwave dish, a software bug—any of it would have turned the screen black and ended the dream.

Then came the moment that truly broke the room.

Engelbart introduced a colleague, Bill Paxton.

Paxton wasn’t on stage. He was thirty miles away, sitting in the lab at SRI.

His face appeared in a window on the screen, crisp and clear.

The audience gasped.

They were looking at a man in Menlo Park, while listening to a man in San Francisco, both looking at the same document on the same screen.

“Okay, Bill,” Engelbart said. “Let’s work on this together.”

On the screen, two cursors appeared. One controlled by Engelbart, one by Paxton.

They edited the text together. Engelbart would point to a sentence, and Paxton would paste it into a new location. They were collaborating, in real-time, across a distance, using a shared digital workspace.

It was Google Docs, Zoom, and Slack, demonstrated a year before the internet (ARPANET) even existed.

The audience, composed of the smartest engineers in the world, sat in stunned silence. They were watching science fiction become a documentary.

They weren’t just seeing new gadgets. They were seeing the destruction of their entire worldview. The idea of the solitary computer operator was dead. The idea of the computer as a mere calculator was dead.

Engelbart was showing them a window into a world where minds could connect through machines.

He typed, he clicked, he spoke. He operated a “chorded keyset” with his left hand, entering commands as fast as a pianist, while his right hand flew across the desk with the mouse. He was a conductor of information.

For ninety minutes, the system held.

The microwave links stayed true. The software didn’t crash. The mainframe thirty miles away processed every command.

When Engelbart finally took off the headset and the screen went dark, there was a pause.

A hesitation.

Then, the audience stood.

It wasn’t a polite golf clap. It was a roar. It was the sound of a thousand experts realizing that everything they knew about their field had just become obsolete.

They rushed the stage. They wanted to touch the mouse. They wanted to see the keyset. They wanted to know how he did it.

The “Mother of All Demos,” as it was later christened, did not immediately change the market. Engelbart did not become a billionaire. He was a researcher, not a salesman. His system was too expensive and too complex for the 1970s.

But the seeds were planted.

Sitting in the audience were the young engineers who would go on to work at Xerox PARC. They would take the mouse, the windows, and the graphical interface, and they would refine them.

Steve Jobs would visit Xerox PARC a decade later, see the descendants of Engelbart’s mouse, and use them to build the Macintosh.

Bill Gates would see it and build Windows.

Tim Berners-Lee would use the concept of hypermedia to build the World Wide Web.

Every smartphone in a pocket, every laptop in a cafe, every video call made to a loved one across the ocean—it all traces back to that ninety-minute window in 1968.

Douglas Engelbart died in 2013. He never sought fame. He watched as the world caught up to the vision he had seen clearly half a century before.

He proved that the pressure of the status quo—the belief that “this is how it’s always been done”—is brittle. It can be broken by a single person with a wooden box and the courage to show us what is possible.

The system said computers were for numbers.

He showed us they were for people.

Sources: Detailed in “The Mother of All Demos” archives (SRI International). Smithsonian Magazine, “The 1968 Demo That Changed Computing.” New York Times obituary for Douglas Engelbart, 2013. Summary of events from the Doug Engelbart Institute records.

The dictionary has multiple definitions of failure:

• 1. lack of success.
• 2. an unsuccessful person or thing.
• 3. the neglect or omission of expected or required action.
• 4. a lack or deficiency of a desirable quality.
• 5. the action or state of not functioning.
• 6. a sudden cessation of power.
• 7. the collapse of a business.

The definitions all deliver the impression of a finite conclusion rather than a step in a process. Failure equals being wrong. Being wrong equals death. As a result, failure has an obvious and deeply negative stigma associated with it. Hence most people fear failing.

In fact many people do not even attempt worthwhile projects for fear of failure. This has been commented upon by various motivational speakers as sad and lamentable but is a natural outcome of the way we are taught to think about failure – it is bad and to be avoided.

And it is a lot easier and very simple to say don’t fear failure than it is to spend the time necessary to change our thinking about it. So what is a better way to think of failure and how do we change our thinking about it?

I don’t know how true it is but I have heard that Edison failed 10,000 times to invent the light bulb before his success. Imagine if he took his first failure as an end point rather than a new starting point. In fact each failure could otherwise be described as a successful experiment to find out that a particular hypothesis did not work.

I was struck by this when I was doing some pullups in the park with 13 kg of weights on my back. I was doing my third set of 5 repetitions and on the last repetition I could not pull myself up more than 85% of my top range of motion. That was my point of failure. Despite my best effort, I could not pull my body up to get my nose over the bar. I “failed“.

Now, when you are exercising, this is something to aim for. Exercising with good form till you are close to failure (with some capacity left in reserve) builds strength and muscle mass.

At this point I realised every person doing resistance training “fails”. We all hit a point where we are at or close to where we can do no more. We are all “failures”, at different points. Some of us fail after 4 repetitions at 13 kg, as did I. Some of fail after 44 repetitions or with 50 kg. None of us stop training “because we failed”. We recognise it as a benchmark or a measure of progress rather than a destination. A “That’s where I am up to.” viewpoint rather than a “That is my end result.” viewpoint.

In many situations, such as in exercise, it is not about failure versus success, it is about WHEN you fail.

Some fail before they start, thinking it is too much effort.

Some fail at the first day that is either too hot or too cold for comfort.

Some fail when their results do not match their expectation.

A rare few fail after they win their marathon, receive their trophy, party on and go to bed at 2:00 am.

It’s all about WHEN you fail! This is why persistence is vital for success. The ultra persistent refuse to fail ’till after the victory party.

Which reminded me of a quote I heard about people who are successful marketers, “They fail fast and they fail often.” They try a lot of things, knowing that many ideas they try will fail and need to be abandoned quickly before wasting too much money on them. By doing that many times and quickly, they sooner or later and without too much wasted money, find that which works and can then do lots of that to huge success.

These top marketers know full well that a fear of failure will not lead to success.

They know that in marketing, as in exercising, it is very easy and natural to view failure as a marker, a peg in the board. A “This is where I am up to”. It is not the end of the road, it is the current position of my progress marker.

What if we started doing that in other spheres of activity? What if every time we thought of something and got the negative thought come in about failing, we just looked at it and thought, “That’s only to be expected. Nothing unusual here. Any time I fail it is merely the current position of my progress marker, just another step toward the ultimate success.”

This I wish for you!