“Men are born to succeed, not fail.” Henry David Thoreau – Perseverance

Transcript

Steve Fouts: 0:03 

Hey everybody, Steve and Dan Fouts here. We are teaching different with  transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau with a quote about perseverance. “Men are born to succeed, not fail.”  He’s using the male pronoun, but we can assume that he’s referring to humanity and success. Failure is something that everybody experiences. We all react to failure and success in different ways. Some of us rest on our laurels, and others treat it as something that you need to keep overcoming; you need to keep challenging yourself.  But, failure is what separates people in a lot of ways. Sometimes failure can ruin a person’s confidence and make it hard for them to continue. For others, it makes them want to pick themselves up and keep going.  What do you think the claim is that the Thoreau is making? 

Dan Fouts: 1:16 – Claim

I read this a few times, and I almost feel like he’s giving a pep talk to people. Men are born to succeed, not to fail. It’s as if you’re talking to a student trying to get them to understand that they’re here on Earth to do great things. They’re not here on earth to fail at things. So, pick your head up and move forward. I would say the claim is to focus on what you can do, rather than on what you can’t do. This is the growth mindset. You can achieve success if you focus, and give yourself the power to succeed through having a positive mindset.  You have to think of yourself as successful before you become successful.  To say men are born to succeed is a reminder that we’re here to be successful.

Steve Fouts: 2:20 

What is their mindset when they succeed at something?  Share an experience of when you succeeded at something?  How did you respond to that? Do you think that you want to challenge yourself with something new?  You don’t want to get a big head, and think that you can take over the world. Do you want to stay humble and focused to take on the next challenge, or do you rest on your laurels? Is it something that you just appreciate for a while?  Have them share some successes that they’ve had and ask how they react to it internally. 

Dan Fouts: 3:02 

Their understanding of their success. Why did you achieve success?  Do you think that you were born to be successful? What do you attribute your success to? Is it hard work, luck, or some other reason? 

Steve Fouts: 3:24 

I like that. Maybe even asking them about the different forms of success that they have had and how they might attribute it to different things. One success might have been due to luck, another due to hard work.  It would be interesting to see how they think about success or failure.  To develop their self-awareness about both. Are there times when you failed, but you feel like you should have succeeded?  Getting them to share their experiences and thoughts would be really interesting. How would you push back on a quote like this?  What’s a good counterclaim to this type of advice?

Dan Fouts: 4:14 – Counterclaim

Maybe another way to look at it is we’re only human and we’re born to make mistakes. I think that’s a lyric of a song. Another way to look at life is to say, I’m going to make mistakes, and I have to learn from my mistakes.  I have to think of success as something that I get after learning from messing up. I have to make adjustments and move forward.  Success is not going to happen magically. Thoreau is saying we’re born to succeed, but maybe we’re born to make mistakes. Let’s deal with that and develop a growth mindset so we can move forward. It’s a subtle, but different perspective.

Steve Fouts: 5:03 

It’s very subtle. You can think about life as being a series of failures and how you react to them.  What you want to be doing is not telling yourself that you’re succeeding all the time.  That attitude might make you not accept failure, and not be able to learn from it. You might get despondent about it.  You might get frustrated. 

Dan Fouts: 5:35 

An awareness of your own inadequacies is an important part of your  development. Don’t put the rosy glasses on and say that you’re destined to  succeed. There’s beauty in your limitations as a person, in addition to your strengths. 

Steve Fouts: 5:54 

It can make you pivot to something else that you may be good at. I’m thinking of a quote we have with Winston Churchill on perseverance, that is similar to this. He’s talking about how success is not fatal. It’s continuing that’s important. 

Dan Fouts: 6:12

Right. The courage to continue. 

Steve Fouts: 6:16 

Telling yourself that you’re a success all the time is not going to keep you going. It’s recognizing that you’re going to have successes, and you’re going to have failures. The important thing to do is to continue forward. 

Dan Fouts: 6:32 

This also makes me think of self-esteem and how people get their self-esteem. Some people believe that if you tell yourself you’re a success, and that you were born to succeed, then you will become happy with who you are.  The other school of thought is that self-esteem comes from the hard work necessary  to correct your mistakes. That’s just another way to think about this. 

Steve Fouts: 6:58 – Essential Question

So, here’s an essential question you could use to wrap up the conversation. Do we have control over our success?  Now, this question brings this to another level. It’s really asking whether or not your success is dependent on your own choices and your own determination, or is your success dependent on the context.  You might have put yourself in a context where you’re not going to succeed.  That’s okay.  It doesn’t have to be bad.  It might be a cue for you to try something different. Failure is okay.  In this sense, I just need to pivot to something that I’m more successful at. That’s one way to deal with failure. Not to tell yourself that you need to be successful at everything, but what’s the best way to spend your time. 

Dan Fouts: 8:04 

This essential question gets to the idea of whether or not your success is a mental thing or a physically active thing.  Do you have to do things to become successful, or do you just have to convince yourself that you’re successful? 

Is it mind control or is it control of your behavior, or both?  This could take the conversation into a lot of different and interesting areas.  

Steve Fouts: 8:30 

This is something that does not end when you finish school. This is something you bring into the world. How you approach failure and success dictates how successful you’re going to be in your career.  

We hope you enjoyed Henry David Thoreau this week. Make sure you visit our Conversation Library where we have many conversations like this, each with a different quote and a sample claim, counterclaim, and an essential question to get you started.

Take care, everybody. We will see you soon. 

Dan Fouts: 9:26 

Take care.