The First Arrow

I should start carrying pencil and paper again, so I can record inspiration any time it comes to me. Yesterday, while watching the fourth episode of the first season of Downton Abbey, I and my family noted two inspirational and profound statements, and now I can only remember one of them: "No one hits a bullseye with their first arrow."

This comment was made to someone who had applied for a job as a secretary and was rejected. They had found someone "better suited and more qualified for the post." Despairing, she said that she felt that there would never be anyone less suited or less qualified than her. As a person who has had beliefs of a similar nature, I knew how she felt.

The encouraging comment reminded her, and me, of the need for perseverance in the face of failure. I'm sure you've heard the saying "if at first, you don't succeed, try, try again." The version I'm in most agreement with concludes with a phrase similar to "and then, if you fail again, give up. There's no sense in being impractical." This makes logical sense to me, yet it's a terrible motto to live by. If Thomas Edison had lived by this motto, the lightbulb would have been invented by someone else, and history would have all but forgotten Edison's name.

Sometimes, success comes only after multiple failed attempts. Such attempts can be discouraging, but they can also make success feel much more rewarding when it is finally achieved. Mastery, too, takes a significant number of attempts. I remember reading (unfortunately, I can't remember where) about the gradual attainment of perfection in terms of learning to play the piano. The logic is that failing to play the piano perfectly is no reason to stop learning altogether. Many things take endless hours of practice in order to gain the desired skills, and countless mistakes will be made along the way, but progress would be made, too, even if it's painfully slow and imperceptible.

If luck is any factor at all, which it almost always is, that adds to the complication. A rare few succeed through sheer luck when they should have failed, and some fail out of sheer luck when they rightfully should have succeeded. How can we know that we're not part of that latter group? The attempted secretary might have been the best suited and most qualified person for the position, and perhaps she would have gotten that job, if not for a whim of fate and a spell of bad luck, and if that was the case, as it might have been, she'd have all the more reason to try again.

Failure is discouraging, but it doesn't need to be final. As long as we keep trying, success may eventually come. And while we're waiting and working for success, we'll find that we're becoming far more capable people than we would have been if we had simply given up after the first failed attempt. A quiver has many arrows in it. Never give up after firing only one.