I’ve read more than once that people have a tendency to give up just before they would’ve had a breakthrough. Scientific discoveries are built on the backs of people who gave up – the next specialist takes one more step, and voilá! It’s the last step, that one last move which takes the Nobel Prize and other accolades.
We push ourselves until we set an arbitrary limit, a personal line in the sand that says, “Stop here.” The winners are those who move their lines, who are willing to set step beyond their self-defined limitations, who recognize that the only certain failure is to stop trying. Notice I didn’t say they didn’t have their limitations – only that they were willing to extend them.
Thomas Edison put it succinctly: “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
Of course there can also be real, legitimate limits we can’t circumvent or surpass. I cannot – within the context of this physical body – spread my wings and fly to the sun, like the fabled Icharus. I wouldn’t melt. I’d just never get off the ground. I don’t have wings, and even wings would fail to protect me against the bitter cold vacuum of space.
Yet mankind as a race has done this: we’ve gone into space, sent probes to other worlds and beyond. We’ve seen up-close images from the moon and Mars, and seen astounding displays of astronomical features well outside the limits of our natural eyesight. Were we relying on our normal physical restrictions we’d have no boats or planes or spaceships, no Internet, no television or radio. We wouldn’t have the printing press, windows or so much as a hammer and nails. The human race would still exist in caves, eating raw meat and leaves, trying to eek out an existence that offered no comforts whatsoever.
Some of us – myself included – tend to forget the greater scope of things. We get so caught up in limitations we forget that sometimes a limitation is nothing but a detour or bump in the road. We can step over or go around. Perhaps the only person who truly grasped that was Leonardo da Vinci, whose spectacular inventions went well beyond the technologies of his time but touch on what we know and do today.
Failure tells us what doesn’t work. To paraphrase Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: whatever’s left over after we figure out what’s wrong, is the answer we were looking for, no matter how improbable.
The hubster and I will be out for the majority of the day – we’re going to look at a couple of more homes. Cross your fingers.