Solitary Soul

DEALING WITH MISTAKES AND FAILURES - PART 1 Mario D'Couto     As the old dictum goes, "Failures are stepping stones to success."  All through our lives, we experience the so - called 'ups and downs'. It is alright and normal to experience it but what is important is to learn form it.     Mistakes have hidden powers to help us but they fail in their mission of helping us when we blame them on other people. When you use excuses, you give up your power to change and improve. So, "Never mind whom you praise but be careful whom you blame." You can fall down many times but you won't be a failure until you say that someone else pushed you.   Arthur Guiterman would say, "Admitting error clears the score and proves you wiser than before."  Failures are experts at making excuses. You waste time and creative energy thinking up excuses.    The person who really wants to do something finds a way, the other finds an excuse a...

DEALING WITH MISTAKES AND FAILURES - PART 2 Mario D'Couto  Here is something enlightening that I read from the book, "Know your limitations - then ignore them" by John Mason on failure,  Paul Galvin, at the age of 33 had failed twice in business. He attended an auction of his own storage battery business. With his last 750 dollars, he brought back the batter eliminator portion of it. That part became Motorola. Upon his retirement in the 1960s, he said, "Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out." George Bernard would say, "A life spent making mistakes is more useful than a life spent doing nothing." To expect your life to be perfectly tailored to your specifications is to live a life of continual frustration.  David McNally mused, "The mistake - riddled life is much richer more interesting and more stimulating than the life that has never risked or taken a stand on anything." What is the difference be...

DEALING WITH MISTAKES AND FAILURES - PART 3 Mario D'Couto    The irony of life is that the greater the fall, the greater the rise. Failures are like bouncing a ball. The more harder a ball is bounced, the greater will it rise. However, in order to deal with it, it is important first and foremost to be committed to a particular goal, as William Matthews would say, "One well cultivated talent, deepened and enlarged, is worth 100  shallow faculties."    Failures and mistakes can be a bridge, not a barricade to success. Theodore Roosevelt said, "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the great twilight that knows not victory or defeat." One of the riskiest things you can do in life is to take too many precautions and never have any failures or mistakes. Failure is the opportunity to start over more...

God's foolishness and man's wisdom Mario D'Couto    When I had seen the movie, "Karol" I was in particular taken up by a dialogue from the movie which goes thus, "The foolishness of God is better than the wisdom of human origin."    It is interesting to see how Jesus tackled those issues where He was tested. In fact, we might just say that His whole life was a test. Right from the experience in the desert to His death on the Cross, He was tested. In this article, we shall see how He did those things. There are 3 instances that come to my mind in this regard,  1) When the woman was caught in adultery, it was done on purpose to trap Jesus. But it is very interesting to see the way Jesus handles the issue. The Gospels tell us that Jesus was writing something on the ground when the Pharisees had brought her to Him. What was He writing? We do not know. But according to some scripture scholars, they are of the opinion that Jesus had already a...