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SUCCESS AND FAILURE: But you successful men, you whose memories are stacked with failure, have you ever considered how important it is to you and your successes that you should continue to experience failures?

Truly, there is hardly a man amongst us who isn't regularly prey to some kind of failure, and most of us could certainly draw up a long list of our most memorable failures - the very ones which we are privately least keen to remember!

But what would we do, you successful failures, if we had never failed in anything? Would we be able to boast of any successes?

Alas, I cannot see that we would! For it seems that our successes are fundamentally dependent upon the intermittent prevalence of our failures, and that without these failures, no matter how hideous or demoralizing some of them were, we should be deprived of even the faintest intimation of success. But who would be able to tolerate a life without some kind of success? Who, with the possible exception of the most unfortunate, would ever be in a position to know what a life without some kind of success was like anyway?

To be sure, one need not be a celebrity to experience such a fundamentally common feature of life. One need only get up at the right time in the morning, prove to be fairly competent in one's work, enjoy a good meal, read an interesting chapter of a worthwhile book, solve a particular problem, maintain congenial relations with one's associates, neighbours, friends, family, etc., or win a raffle, to experience the essential feeling of success, a feeling which isn't restricted to only a 'privileged few', by any means!

So if you value your successes, you successful men, see to it that you aren't ashamed of your failures. For they are not as great an obstacle to your successes as you may at first imagine. On the contrary, they are your greatest incentive to leap ever higher!