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Learning to Get Up
By Felix | July 15, 2008
Bringing a giraffe into the world is a tall order. A baby giraffe falls 10 feet from its mother’s womb and usually lands on its back. Within seconds it rolls over and tucks its legs under its body. From this position it considers the world for the first time and shakes off the last vestiges of the birthing fluid from its eyes and ears. Then the mother giraffe rudely introduces its offspring to the reality of life.
In his book, A View from the Zoo, Gary Richmond describes how a newborn giraffe learns its first lesson. The mother giraffe lowers her head long enough to take a quick look. Then she positions herself directly over her calf. She waits for about a minute, and then she does the most unreasonable thing. She swings her long, pendulous leg outward and kicks her baby, so that it is sent sprawling head over heels. When it doesn’t get up, the violent process is repeated over and over again. The struggle to rise is momentous. As the baby calf grows tired, the mother kicks it again to stimulate its efforts. Finally, the calf stands for the first time on its wobbly legs.
Then the mother giraffe does the most remarkable thing. She kicks it off its feet again. Why? She wants it to remember how it got up. In the wild, baby giraffes must be able to get up as quickly as possible to stay with the herd, where there is safety. Lions, hyenas, leopards, and wild hunting dogs all enjoy young giraffes, and they’d get it too, if the mother didn’t teach her calf to get up quickly and get with it.
The late Irving Stone understood this. He spent a lifetime studying greatness, writing novelized biographies of such men as Michelangelo, Vincent van Gogh, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin. Stone was once asked if he had found a thread that runs through the lives of all these exceptional people. He said, “I write about people who sometime in their life have a vision or dream of something that should be accomplished and they go to work.
“They are beaten over the head, knocked down, vilified, and for years they get nowhere. But every time they’re knocked down they stand up. You cannot destroy these people. And at the end of their lives they’ve accomplished some modest part of what they set out to do.”
We have all had our fair share of defeats in different aspects of life, but it has always been our ability to rise again after each blow that determines how far or how well ahead we get in life, the names that are mentioned above and a few others that we see in the news or read about in the papers from across the globe, is usually because these person have gone through defeats and have been able to handle or bounce back after each fall, that makes their names become known.
I remember when I a quote from one of my favorites post on this blog double your failure rate it’s a must read, I was inspired to write it when I read this quote “To double your success rate, double your failure rate.” — Tom Watson, Sr., founder of IBM.
This lets you know that to get ahead, you must “learn how to take each slap of failure with enthusiasm.” – felix ekpa.
Peace n a fist!
Topics: Failure, life lessons, motivation, success principles |
July 16th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
This is timely…Thanks
July 19th, 2008 at 1:00 am
i have learn how to bounce back which has taking me somewhere and am very sure that my name will become known soon
July 20th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
know yourself and what you want first then be open with yourself about what you are trully after and stop pursueing strategy to get things moving else you will end up freaking out, dont set yourself up for a situation that is okay but wont work for you {One minute you are happy and then a day or two later you are sulking
and awkward because you just blurted out of what you are feeling} is better to get the picture of what you actually want so that your expectations wont be completely out of line
July 20th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
know yourself and what you want first then be open with yourself about what you are truly after and stop pursuing strategy to get things moving else you will end up freaking out, don’t set yourself up for a situation that is ok but wont work for you {One minute you are happy and then a day or two later you are sulking
and awkward because you just blurted out of what you are feeling} is better to get the picture of what you actually want so that your expectations wont be completely out of line
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:57 pm
The next time you think something is impossible, give it a try and see what happens. Even if you are half-hearted to begin with, a few signs of success may inspire greater and greater efforts.
A champion is someone who gets up, even when he can’t.
July 31st, 2008 at 11:54 am
As its said, experience is the best teacher,if you try this and it doesnt work out,you learn from your mistakes and move forward. The only problem is when we are not ready to learn.
August 13th, 2008 at 11:53 am
failing is difficult to acept and not pleasant at all but i have learn a lot from my failures than i have ever learnt from the success i have made this article is simple true