Quote of the Day (Annie Sullivan, on ‘Beginning and Failing’)

“No matter what happens, keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until you find that you have accomplished a purpose—not the one you began with, perhaps, but one that you will be glad to remember.”—Irish-American teacher and disabilities advocate Annie Sullivan (1866-1936), quoted by student Helen Keller, Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy (1955)

Quote of the Day (Abraham Lincoln, on Success Through Avoiding ‘Personal Contention’)

“Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention.” —President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), letter to Capt. James M. Cutts, October 26, 1863, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Volume 6.

As President during the Civil War, Lincoln could not avoid “contention,” nor could he in his marriage. But his patience towards the difficult Mary Todd Lincoln was extraordinary, and his disagreements with opponents were based on policy—what to do about slavery and secession— rather than personality.

That goes a long way towards explaining how he held together a still-young Republican Party—a coalition founded simply on opposing the extension of slavery into new territories—as well as Northern and border states with fundamental disagreements during the war on what to do with slavery even where it existed.

Lincoln could affect not simply events but people, as seen in how he handled the messy situation that gave rise to the quote above. He appears to have delivered these remarks in person to Captain James Cutts, a brother-in-law of the President’s longtime Illinois political rival, Stephen A. Douglas.

Cutts had been court-martialed for several offenses, including arguing with fellow officers—the “personal contention” to which Lincoln referred.

On appeal, Lincoln approved Cutts’ convictions but reduced the sentences to a written reprimand.

The effect of his shrewd advice to the 26-year-old soldier was profound: Cutts took it to heart enough that he decided to prove his worth on the battlefield rather than through fisticuffs. He would receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for his bravery at the battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Petersburg.

Quote of the Day (Mel Brooks, on Why ‘It’s Important to Fail’)

“Failure is vital. It is an incredibly important quotient in the equation of a career. After you wipe away your tears, it’s not a bad experience and under the right circumstances it will make you better, both as a person and as an artist. I think it’s important to fail, especially between the ages of twenty and thirty. Success is like sugar. It’s too good. It’s too sweet. It’s too wonderful and it burns up very quickly. Failure is like corned beef hash. It takes a while to eat. It takes a while to digest. But it stays with you.”—Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award winning writer, director, actor, and songwriter Mel Brooks, All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business (2021)

Quote of the Day (Theodore Roosevelt, on Effort, Failure and Success)

“We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort.”—Theodore Roosevelt, 26^th President of the United States (1858-1919), “The Strenuous Life,” address delivered in Chicago, Apr. 10, 1899

Quote of the Day (Anthony Hopkins, on the Need to ‘Act As If It’s Impossible to Fail’)

“[T]he story of my life was to believe and visualise a powerful outcome. Even if sometimes, you know, you always have doubts, but when the doubts come, just push through and believe that it's going to work. Act as if it’s impossible to fail.”—Oscar-winning actor Anthony Hopkins quoted in Tim Auld, “Act As If It’s Impossible to Fail,” The Financial Times (Weekend “How to Spend It” section), Sept. 26, 2020

(The image accompanying this post is a photo of Anthony Hopkins taken at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 1996, taken by John Mathew Smith and www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel, Md.)

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on ‘The Fulfilled Future and the Wistful Past’)

"The man who blooms at thirty blooms in summer. But the compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young. When the primary objects of love and money could be taken for granted and a shaky eminence had lost its fascination, I had fair years to waste, years that I can't honestly regret, in seeking the eternal Carnival by the Sea. Once in the middle twenties I was driving along the High Corniche Road through the twilight with the whole French Riviera twinkling on the sea below. As far ahead as I could see was Monte Carlo, and though it was out of season and there were no Grand Dukes left to gamble and E. Phillips Oppenheim was a fat industrious man in my hotel, who lived in a bath-robe—the very name was so incorrigibly enchanting that I could only stop the car and like the Chinese whisper: ‘Ah me! Ah me!’ It was not Monte Carlo I was looking at. It was back into the mind of the young man with cardboard soles who had walked the streets of New York. I was him again—for an instant I had the good fortune to share his dreams, I who had no more dreams of my own. And there are still times when I creep up on him, surprise him on an autumn morning in New York or a spring night in Carolina when it is so quiet that you can hear a dog barking in the next county. But never again as during that all too short period when he and I were one person, when the fulfilled future and the wistful past were mingled in a single gorgeous moment—when life was literally a dream."—American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), from “Early Success,” in The Crack-Up, edited by Edmund Wilson (1945)

Happy 124^th birthday to my favorite writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Quote of the Day (Jerry Kramer, on the Packers’ Indestructible Willie Davis)

“Once I was standing on the sidelines when [Green Bay Packers defensive end and teammate] Willie [Davis] came out of the game with a dislocated finger. I saw the bone sticking through the skin. The trainer grabbed the finger, yanked the bone back in place, then taped the finger to the adjoining fingers. Willie ran back to the game.”— Jerry Kramer (with Dick Schaap), Distant Replay (1985)

Remembering Pro Football Hall of Famer—and successful post-football businessman—Willie Davis (1934-2020). 

When I was growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, my high school, St. Cecilia (Englewood, NJ) took special pride in the Packers, the team built by our football coach through much of the 1940s, Vince Lombardi. A July 1960 trade that Lombardi helped engineer for Davis became one of the building blocks of that pro sports dynasty. 

In his autobiography Closing the Gap: Lombardi, the Packers Dynasty, and the Pursuit of Excellence, Davis credited his coach not only with helping him feel more comfortable, as an African-American in largely white Green Bay, but also in having faith in him as a player but also as a student with the discipline to complete his MBA in 1968 by working through the offseason.

 

Motivation, self-discipline and faith—essential ingredients for success in whatever field that your career takes you to…

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Big Bang Theory,’ In Which Sheldon Voices His Eternal Dilemma)

[Dr. Sheldon Cooper has been rehearsing his Nobel Prize speech.]

Dr. Amy Farrar Fowler [played by Mayim Bialik]: “Sheldon, why are you talking so fast?”

Sheldon [played by Jim Parsons]: “I'm trying to get my speech down to ninety minutes.”

Amy: “Nobody's going to be able to understand a word you're saying.”

Sheldon: “Welcome to my life.”—The Big Bang Theory, Season 12, Episode 24, “The Stockholm Syndrome,” original air date May 16, 2019, teleplay by 13 writers!, directed by Mark Cendrowski       

So, after 12 seasons, The Big Bang Theory is finally over. True, the show may have stayed on about three years too long and the finale a bit predictable. But at least showrunner Chuck Lorre wasn’t untrue to the spirit or premise of the show or make a hash of the whole thing, the way Seinfeld went out. 

Remarkable, too, isn’t it, that with roughly seven co-equal stars, Lorre does not seem to have a major problem with any of them—unlike his other megahit, Two and a Half Men, which had far fewer leads to handle, but one of them happened to be Charlie (“I got tiger blood”) Sheen.

(As you might be able to tell from the credits listing above, I am rather astounded that 13 writers contributed to the finale. I always thought it remarkable that eight screenwriters had a hand in the old Tom Hanks movie Turner and Hooch, about a man's relationship with his dog. But I guess that the necessity of ending this sitcom on--pardon me!--a bang required extreme measures.)

The Big Bang Theory ended with Sheldon’s resounding professional success, but even if he and Amy hadn’t ended up winning the Nobel, the series had already made plain, they and their friends had already succeeded—by finding personal happiness through mutual friendship and love. 

It’s an old message, maybe even a clichéd one, but in this time and culture celebrating winning at any personal cost, maybe it has to be taught and learned all over again.

Quote of the Day (Christopher Morley, on How There Is ‘Only One Success’)

"There is only one success: to be able to spend life in your own way and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it." —American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet Christopher Morley (1890-1957), Where the Blue Begins (1922)

Quote of the Day (Bette Davis, on Why She Was ‘Doomed to an Eternity of Compulsive Work’)

“I am doomed to an eternity of compulsive work. No set goal achieved satisfies. Success only breeds a new goal. The golden apple devoured has seeds. It is endless.”—Two-time Oscar-winning actress Bette Davis (1908-1989), The Lonely Life (1962)

Quote of the Day (Georges Bernanos, on Succeeding in Small Things)

“But I shall give less thought to the future, I shall work in the present. I feel such work is within my power. For I only succeed in small things, and when I am tried by anxiety, I am bound to say it is the small joys that release me.”—French Catholic writer Georges Bernanos (1888-1948), The Diary of a Country Priest: A Novel (1936