Blog about Leadership

Quote for Leaders from Charles C. Noble:
“You must have long term goals to keep you from being frustrated by short term failures.”

On this site, I’ve written before that dreams can come true through the implementation of incremental goals. For the sake of consistency, relate dreams as long-term goals and it starts to make sense. I’m not talking about dreams like winning the lottery, but rather realistic dreams like building a successful, multinational company – something that can be accomplished with effort, ingenuity, planning, and, then, a little good luck. Remember, of course, the famous quote from Louis Pasteur, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” While in order to win the lottery, you have to prepare by buying a lottery ticket and/or selecting your numbers, the bulk of the event is locked in chance. Where chance is an additional factor, not the primary factor, preparedness can be the difference.

Too often, while working along the path of incremental goals, some of those goals may be failures, but it doesn’t have to cause the big picture to be a failure.

J.K. Rowling 

Last year, J.K. Rowling gave a commencement address at Harvard. In her speech, she said, “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.” This is a woman who was a single mother, reliant upon welfare benefits, who went from poverty to wealth through creating the Harry Potter books. Harry Potter is now is a multibillion dollar brand and J.K. Rowling is very wealthy in her own right. The initial story was written at time when J.K. Rowling’s mother had died after a ten-year battle with multiple sclerosis, when she had dealt with a divorce from the father of her child, and suffered through her own battle with clinical depression and thoughts of suicide (the source of influence for the Dementors characters – the soulless creature who suck happiness from its victims). For J.K. Rowling, she found her success by knowing that failure was merely part of the journey to success, not the destination.

Dreams can come true through the implementation of incremental goals. Long-term goals are the focus to move beyond short-term failures.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to my RSS feed.