During my childhood, a neighbor had a little china plate hanging in the living room that read "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no sense in making a fool of yourself." When it came to my aborted singing career, I didn't bother to try again. I skipped right ahead to the quit, a choice I continue to regret. Rather than analyze my mistakes, I gave up and buried an ambition.
What I should have done was prepare to win, power through, and, if I truly couldn't do it, embrace the failure, then figure out how to become better. A central tenet to success is to show up again and again and again - to take an alternate approach, and keep at it until it works. And when we show up, act boldly, and practice the best ways to be wrong, we fail forward. No matter here we end up, we've grown from where we began.
Stacey Abrams "Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Real Change" (2018)
