You Can Not Fail
The following is an excerpt from the book The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur
You cannot put a fire out;/A thing that can ignite/Can go, itself, without a fan/Upon the slowest night.//You cannot fold a flood/And put it in a drawer, — /Because the winds would find it out,/And tell your cedar floor.
Emily Dickinson — “Power” Complete Poems (1855)
What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?
Powerful question right? (There’s an Etsy print and t-shirt if you need the extra motivation.)
The question above has become a popular Silicon Valley startup slogan but its roots go back to a popular Christian televangelist from the 1970s, Robert Schuller.
But the thing is you can’t put a fire out — you can’t fail.
You’re not your circumstances or even your past and current experience, you are a fire, a thing that can ignite again and again.
As long as you’re doing something worth doing — and you get to define “worth doing” — you cannot fail.
Challenge Question: So then, what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? What goals would you be setting for yourself if you knew you could not fail?
