On July 17, 2008, Al Gore challenged the United States to do the right thing in the same spirit that John F. Kennedy challenge us to go to the moon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAnQ1cFA_zM&eurl=http://www.leadershipjot.com/2008/07/27/al-gore%e2%80%99s-challenge-to-america/

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Quote about Success and Failure from Sir Winston Churchill:
“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”

Keep failures in perspective: failures happen and then there’s success – fail, persevere, learn, and then succeed.

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Donald Trump

I was watching a news program a while back and Donald Trump was on the show for a question and answer session with the audience. When asked about his experiences, he provided a lot of tips and suggestions for entrepreneurs to succeed. His tips were varied from getting flack for his hair and handling the necessity of a prenuptial agreement when a relationship becomes a marriage.

Focus

There was one observation which Donald Trump provided that struck a cord with me. When asked about learning from mistakes/failures in his past, he summed his problems up in one point – losing focus. From all of his experiences, from the times when every deal he touched turned to gold to the period when he encountered a negative net-worth of $900 million, all of his mistakes/failures were due to losing focus.

I find this to be true for me. From academic to work goals and even with personal projects, I also tend to lose focus. My many interests distract me. I was never a person who had just one goal or one career or one-track thought-process. I have always been a person who has many different goals, interests, and ambitions.

Even when I was a kid, I remember getting teased by my cousin because I always wanted to be so many things when I grew up – from a professional baseball player and a boxer to a private detective and a soldier. If you read my resume closely, you would probably laugh because I have had some of the careers that I dreamed about as a kid.
I was a soldier and I was a private detective.

Overtime, I learned the importance of focus and now have a lot more success as a result.

Winston Churchill and Interest

By far, the strongest factor in learning and focus is interest. When you have an interest in something, it takes very little effort to learn and focus on it.

Quote about learning from Winston Churchill from his autobiography, A Roving Commission: My Early Life:
“Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn.”

Learning is best response to failure. Interest and focus are the most important factors in learning. I have written a lot of about failures on this blog and I will continue to address the topic when I have more value to add to the discussion. The most important point to remember and to teach to others is to not focus on the failure, but to focus on what you can learn from it.

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