NEVER GIVE UP!

It is not wise for anyone to ever have a feeling of "I am
holier than thou" toward any part of life, for every individual
on Earth has made plenty of mistakes sometime, somewhere!
It has been said that the only people who do not make mistakes
are in cemeteries and another has said: "The man who never
made a mistake never made much of anything else either. He
leaves no honor to his name and no monument to his memory."
Henry Ford forgot to put a reverse shift in his first motorcar
(evidently being interested only in going forward not in re-
verse!) . Thomas Edison once spent a million dollars, years of
time and tons of energy, on an experiment that never left the
laboratory and has not yet rendered any known service to
mankind.


So, it is not making mistakes that matters it is what one is
trying to do to correct them! It is not falling down that matters,
it is how long you allow yourself to lie there. You can always
get up one more time than you fall down! You can always try
again one more time to succeed. You can profit by past mis-
takes and make them "stepping stones" to a permanent success.
It is up to the individual himself. Different experiences affect
different people differently!


Once upon a time, a very discouraged man who seemed to
have lost everything of this world's goods, took a walk in the
woods one Sunday morning. Sitting down upon a log, he
noticed an ordinary ant pulling along a straw, much larger
and longer than itself. The ant came to quite a wide "crack"
in the trunk of the fallen tree a space which he could not span
with his little body. He laid the straw down for a moment
and, running up and down the side of the crevice (which
seemed very small to the man), the ant saw there was no way
to cross that open space. Suddenly, the ant grasped the straw
again and pushed it across the crevice. Resting it firmly on the
other side, he walked across on the straw and, pulling the
straw with him, went on his way. He used his burden to take
him where he wanted to go! His "burden" became a "stepping
stone" for him. The man, encouraged by what he had seen,
got up tried again with real success this time!