Never ever give up!

Florence Chadwick in one of her swims.

Falling short of expectations could be used as an excuse to give up. Often that’s all that seems possible in the face of a big setback. But failure can also be a form of encouragement to go on and persevere. Swimmer Florence Chadwick of Southern California remembers well her first race as a six-year-old. She laughingly recalled “six girls entered and I finished dead last. But finishing last made me want to swim better. So I trained and trained. My motto was to give it all you’ve got, or don’t do it at all.” Chadwick’s strength and endurance, propelled by an earlier failure, led her to swim the English Channel in 1950 in record time, knocking more than an hour off the standard set 19 years earlier.
Flaubert once wrote: “Remember that the most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to live and the promise of future accomplishments.” Consider the famous children’s book author Dr. Seuss. His first book was rejected by 23 publishers. The 24th publisher has sold 6 million copies of the book ‘The Cat in the Hat,’ just in its first printing. Who knows how many millions more copies were printed since then.