Every day for the rest of your life you will find yourself at one of three phases: aspiration, success, failure. You will battle the ego in each of them. You will make mistakes in each of them.

Wisdom or ignorance? Ego is the swing vote.

It’s why the old Celtic saying tells us, “See much, study much, suffer much, that is the path to wisdom.”

As Harold Geneen put it, “People learn from their failures. Seldom do they learn anything from success.”

the critic who attacks you. The former partner who stole your business idea. The bitch or the bastard who cheated on you. Love.

You know what is a better response to an attack or a slight or something you don’t like? Love. That’s right, love. For the neighbor who won’t turn down the music. For the parent that let you down. For the bureaucrat who lost your paperwork. For the group that rejects you. For

Harsh, yes. The flip side is that it means being honestly able to be proud and strong during the occasional defeat as well. When you take ego out of the equation, other people’s opinions and external markers won’t matter as much. That’s more difficult, but ultimately a formula for resilience.

This is characteristic of how great people think. It’s not that they find failure in every success. They just hold themselves to a standard that exceeds what society might consider to be objective success. Because of that, they don’t much care what other people think; they care whether they meet their own standards. And these standards are much,

The only real failure is abandoning your principles. Killing what you love because you can’t bear to part from it is selfish and stupid. If your reputation can’t absorb a few blows, it wasn’t worth anything in the first place.