Teachings,+Wisdom+and+Inspiration+for+Jedi

Wisdom and inspiration for Jedi
(Kai Stormwalker)

From //Dojo Wisdom// by Jennifer Lawler


 * No one fails who keeps trying**

If an attacker grabs you on the street and you, yell, "No! Let me go!" and the attacker doesn't let go, have you failed at defending yourself? Of course not. There's plenty left you can do to make the attacker let you go.

If you're trying to break a board with a side kick, and you kick the board, and it does not break, have you failed to break the board? Not if you kick it again. (You may have failed to break the board on the first try, but that is not the same thing, and it's not the most important thing.)

It's saddening the number of people who try something once and fail and consider themselves failures. I know would-be writers who get two or three rejection letters and give up because they're failures. I might be dense, but in the course of my writing career, including the days before I was published, I have received literally hundreds (maybe thousands) of rejection letters. But I've published almost twenty books. That's not failure, So, if getting a thousand rejection letters isn't failure, how can getting two or three be failure? I always assumed that I was in fact a talented, maybe even brilliant, writer, but that my timing was off or that I was just asking the wrong editors - for instance, the ones who couldn't perceive my brilliance. So it just never occurred to me that I had failed. I just wasn't successful at that time.

I admit that my confidence was shaken now and then by the sheer weight of that avalanche of rejection but I knew I would keep trying until I was dead, after which time it presumably wouldn't matter to me if I had ever gotten published or not. I don't know that I would have continued persisting, however, if I had not had martial arts training.

In all martial arts, perseverance is a key component to success. If you can't do the side kick on the first try, you just keep trying it until you can do it. You're not a failure because you can't do the kick on the first try or the tenth try. You're not a failure if you can't do the kick even though the person next to you who started at the same time can. You're just a learner, still trying. You just haven't succeeded yet.

//Exercise//

If you have a goal that you've given up trying to reach, re-examine it. Do you really want to abandon the goal? Is it really no longer worthwhile to you or have you just given up hope that you could achieve it? Dust off the goal and give it another try - or another dozen tries. As long as you're trying, you haven't failed. (These have to be meaningful tries, not half-hearted attempts, or there's no reason to bother.)