Nicolas Bauer

Learning from our mistakes

Presented November 4, 2009

I would like to talk about something that I believe we all wish to attain, which is success in life. We have goals we want to reach and we have an image of where we see ourselves once we graduate.

Here at school these dreams are already in danger due to the presence of challenges, but if there is one thing for sure it’s that the challenges we face here are nothing to the challenges I or any one us will have to face after school. Here we are protected and in an environment to help us grow and develop into what we want to become. Starting next year for most of us and in the years after for the rest of you, we will be faced with tougher challenges that we will have to face alone.

On the road to our success we will fail at one point or another and when that happens it will be up to ourselves to pick ourselves up and to continue to push on. You won’t be able to blame your parents, your friends or anybody else. We must look at ourselves and learn from our mistakes and try again. The real failure is if you decide to give up. This means you will never be able to achieve what you have in you to become.

Muhammad Ali once said “I never thought of losing, but now that it' s happened, the only thing is to do it right. That's my obligation to all the people who believe in me. We all have to take defeats in life.”

If we can’t take a defeat in our life then we can never grow fully as a person. Only through failure can we develop and learn. Yet we must remember not to be afraid of failing because you can always start over and try again. The greatest have failed hundreds of times but they became the greatest because they continued even through failure and defeat. Michael Jordan was one of these greats who failed many times and this is what he had to say: “I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. I've never been afraid to fail.”

Finally, I will leave you guys with one more quote from Samuel Smile: “It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.”

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