Quote of the Day: Charles F. Kettering on Success (Feb 24)

Late February carries a particular mood: the shine of New Year promises has worn off, and spring is still a rumor. This is the season when the calendar stops cheering for you and simply waits to see what you’ll repeat. That’s why Kettering’s line lands with such clean force: “It doesn't matter if you try, and try, and try again, and fail. It does matter if you try, and fail, and fail to try again”.

Notice the pivot. Repeated failure isn’t treated as tragedy; it’s treated as background noise, expected, even. The moral weight arrives only when failure becomes a decision to stop. The real danger isn’t losing; it’s turning one bad outcome into an identity: “I’m not good at this”, “I always mess this up”, “It’s not for me”. That move feels like self-protection, but it’s actually self-sabotage in disguise.

To use this quote well, you need a simple rule: make your next attempt smaller than your last disappointment. Don’t demand a heroic comeback. Demand a controlled experiment. Write one paragraph instead of a chapter. Make one sales call instead of “rebuilding your pipeline”. Have the two-minute conversation instead of waiting for the perfect hour. This is how resilience becomes practical, not as stubbornness, but as a willingness to be corrected by reality.

Charles F. Kettering earned his confidence in iteration as an inventor of the electric starter and as a leader who helped shape General Motors’ modern research-and-development engine, places where progress is literally built from prototypes, tests, and revisions.

Today, pick one lingering problem and define a single “try again” that you can complete in under 15 minutes, then write down what you learned as if you were collecting lab notes. Protect the loop, not your ego; that’s where growth lives. Go gently, try again, and let the next version of you arrive by doing.