If you’re human, you are going to make mistakes. I love Denis Waitley’s perspective: “Mistakes are painful when they happen, but years later a collection of mistakes is what is called experience.” John Maxwell says there are two kinds of people in regards to setbacks: splatters, who hit the bottom, fall apart and stay on…

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When I decided to adapt my 2013 book Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Learn for a teen audience, I was excited about adding ideas and illustrations that teens would relate to. And it was a fun and insightful process. In the book, which releases this week, you can find stories about people like championship surfer…

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What an exciting project I got to do last year! For the first time ever, I got to adapt and rewrite one of my books for a new audience: Teens. The book is Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Learn for Teens, and it comes out this month – on February 24. Created just for teen…

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Kevin Durant, Most Valuable Player of the NBA, recognized that receiving a trophy celebrating his individual brilliance gave the false impression that he had earned the accolade on his own.  He admitted this during an emotional acceptance speech at his MVP award ceremony. When we see an outstanding performer, we’re awed and amazed by their…

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The sun’ll come outTomorrow So ya gotta hang on ‘Til tomorrow Come what may Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I love ya Tomorrow! You’re always A day Away! ~ “Tomorrow” from the Broadway musical Annie With all due respect to little orphan Annie, just thinking about tomorrow takes us away from the things we should do today. Indeed,…

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If you ignore a rattle or hum in your vehicle’s engine for too long, your car may stop running. One defective part can cause the automobile to break down completely. Similarly, the smooth functioning of a team is impacted by its weakest link. When one person routinely underperforms, the whole team suffers. People who consistently…

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A man and his dog returned home from a walk through the woods covered in cockleburs. The tiny burs had clung to the man’s pants and the dog’s fur, and it took a long while to disentangle them all. The man, Swiss engineer George de Mestral, was impressed by how easily the burs had latched…

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The young girl skipped onto the stage of the dilapidated, half-filled theater hall, her thin voice competing with the noise of an unruly audience. Midway through the first verse of her first song, a beer bottle smashed onto the floor just a yard or so in front of her. The child’s voice quaked momentarily, but…

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“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”- Thomas A. Edison Nobody likes to fail. But if we’re honest, we understand that failure is a part of life. There is no success without some amount of failure. Great inventors like Thomas Edison experience a lot of failures on the way to…

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I recently shared a few quotes on mistakes here. And based on the comments, they seemed to strike a chord for many of you. I believe you can’t have too much instruction on the value of mistakes. So I thought I’d share one of my favorite illustrations on the subject. This is quoted in my…

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