I have a collection of popular quotations about failure. Instead of just talking about these quotations, I have incorporated them in an interactive exercise. This activity provides an effective opener for a training session on handling failure.
Synopsis
Distribute a handout with a list of quotations about handling failure. Assign two of the quotations randomly to each participant. After a pause, read a quotation and ask two participants to make a presentation about the quotation. Repeat this procedure with other quotations.
Purpose
To reflect on important principles for handling failure.
Participants
Minimum: 2
Maximum: 30
Best: 5 to 15
Time
10 to 45 minutes
Handout
Failure Quotations
Preparation
Collect quotations. Gather or create several pithy sayings, aphorisms, adages, maxims, slogans, truisms, mottoes, proverbs, or one-liners related to failure. Create a 1-page handout with a numbered list of these items.
Circle two numbers. Before the session, circle two items in each handout, using this constraint:
Each handout has two circled numbers.
Each circled number is duplicated in two different handouts.
Flow
Distribute the handouts. At the beginning of the session, distribute a handout to each participant. Make sure that each circled item is given to two different participants.
Invite reflection. Ask the participants to reflect on each item in the handout, discover its deeper meaning, and identify personal applications. Advise the participants that they will be asked to make a short presentation on the circled items.
Call for paired presentations. After a suitable pause, randomly select one of the items from the handout. Read this item and ask the two participants who received the circled item to take turns and make their presentations.
Encourage discussion. After the two presentations, invite comments from the other participants. If appropriate, conduct a poll (by asking the participants to raise their hands) to identify the better presentation.
Continue the activity. Repeat the procedure with other randomly selected items.
Conclude the activity. It is not necessary to invite every participant to make a presentation. After a few paired presentations, invite the participants who feel they have important insights to share them with the others.
Handout
Failure Quotations
A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
Failure is an event, never a person. (William D. Brown)
Failure is not the only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of others. (Jules Renard.)
Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat. – (Theodore Roosevelt)
Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. (Thomas A. Edison)
If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style. (Quentin Crisp)
Never confuse a single defeat with final defeat. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. (Sir Winston Churchill)
The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary, it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. Failure makes people cruel and bitter. (W. Somerset Maugham)
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. (J. K. Rowling)
Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't as all. You can be discouraged by failure - or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember, that's where you will find success. (Thomas J. Watson)
You always pass failure on the way to success. (Mickey Rooney)You can’t have any successes until you can accept failures. (George Cukor)
You can’t have success without failure. (Anonymous)