Why Do People Fail at Exercise? - Introduction
Failure is a subject not many people care to talk about. After all, who wants to be associated with failure? To fail means you blew it. You lost. You screwed up. Or does it?
In 1955 Johnny Unitas was drafted number nine from the University of Louisville by the Pittsburgh Steelers. That same year he was cut and played semipro sandlot football for only $6 a game. If you're familiar with the NFL, you know that Johnny Unitas didngive up. The following year he went on to play with the Baltimore Colts, eventually leading them to championship seasons in 1958 and 1959. He also played in10 pro bowls and was MVP in three of them.
If it weren't for Walt Disney's enthusiasm and willingness to persevere we wouldn't have ever heard of Mickey Mouse and Disneyworld. His initial experimentation with the animated film, The Alice Commodities, was a complete flop. When he was 22, his company went bankrupt. Walt Disney never gave up and is now considered an American icon.
How many of you Elvis Presley fans knew he was fired from the Grand Ole Opry after one performance in 1954? Elvis kept singing and the rest is history.
For those of you who like to "fly the friendly skies," be thankful that Orville and Wilbur Wright didn't give up and stick with only the bicycle business. In 1903, four years after they experimented with their first flying machine, history was made in Kitty Hawk. It was thanks to their obsession and belief in themselves we now can get from one end of the country to the other in a matter of hours.
Thomas Edison patented 1,093 inventions in his lifetime. How many failures do you think he overcame in the process? If Edison had given up one failure short of his greatest invention, we would all be in the dark.
These and many other greats are true examples of why you can't let failure haunt you. Louis E. Boone says it nicely: "Don't fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have."
If you've failed at exercise before or have failed to start, become a walking testimony and do what many who have gone before you did...don't give up.
"Many of life's failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." ~ Thomas Edison
