moneyFYI
Financial Freedom Is Merely Organized Common Sense
Individual Successes or Failures Do Not Matter.
When evaluating your life it does not pay you to focus on mistakes. It is not whether you win or lose that matters, it is your career average, that matters.
Trick question. Of the 10 baseball pitchers who have lost more than 250 games in their career, how many failed to make the Hall of Fame?
You would like to say losing 250 games is a bad thing and none made it, but of the ten who lost 250 times or more, nine are in the Hall. Only Jack Powell with 254 losses missed out. He had a losing career mark, but of all pitchers with a losing record, he has the most wins. (245)
All time biggest loser, with 314, is Cy Young. Nolan Ryan lost 292. You may have heard of them.
Babe Ruth struck out about once every six at bats. Mickey Mantle about once in five and Willie Mays about once in seven. The all-time leader in strikeouts with 2,597 is Reggie Jackson. All in the Hall of Fame.
The moral of the story. You cannot achieve success without risking failure. Neither failure nor success are an absolute condition.
Don Shaughnessy is a retired partner in an international accounting firm and is presently with The Protectors Group, a large personal insurance, employee benefits and investment agency in Peterborough Ontario.
don@moneyfyi.com | Twitter @DonShaughnessy | Follow by email at moneyFYI
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Excellent point, which highlights a major misconception of our age–that self-evaluation has merit. Not only is comparison the thief of joy (Theodore Roosevelt), but our assignment of success or failure predisposes that we see the larger picture. We may well be winning at checkers, only to find out that we were supposed to be playing chess. It thus behoves us to make sure our goals have some basis in reality that goes beyond the “wisdom of the day.”