You are only a failure if....

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I was attending a talk the other day when the speaker said, "A failure is not a person who constantly attempts something and failed in those attempts. A failure is a person who knows what is wrong, but not making any effort to change." I cannot help but keep thinking about it. And it has been in my head ever since. And I find those two little sentences so true and meaningful. We cannot term a person a failure if we see that he is trying to do something but failed at getting it done right. But if he attempts it again, with a different method to try and solve the problems he faced when attempting it, then he learned something and moved on to a better solution to tackle whatever challenge he is doing. He may fail at getting that challenge conquered again. But if he recognizes his mistake and reattempts it with a better solution, he may eventually become successful one day. And through the whole process, he would have learned numerous ways of how not to do something. So this person is not a failure. Cos he is trying to get something done right. It is just that he has not used the right solution to fix the problem when he attempted the challenge. BUT, if a person were to do something, and failed at it. And then he keeps blaming the situation, blaming the people who did not make the thing work, or even blame the challenge itself, what has he learned? If he reattempts the same challenge, but doing it the same way he did before, knowing full well that the same method of tackling the problem will eventually lead to failure, he still do it, what would the end result be? It will still be a failed attempt at the challenge. The problem never go away, and he never learned anything new. And he will keep blaming everything that went wrong on everything and everyone else other than himself. And eventually, he will give up on ever trying to overcome that challenge. That, to me, is a real failure. And it can all be summarized in two little sentence. Have you ever met people from these two camps before? I certainly have. Do share your stories of the people you meet who fall into these two categories.