In their book The Truth About Leadership, James Kouzes and Barry Posner tell the story of a friend who took his first skiing lessons.  Their friend gloated in the fact that he had spent the entire day on his skis without falling down one time.  When he bragged to the skiing instructor about his successful day the instructor was not impressed at all and said, “I personally think you had a lousy day.”  Dumbfounded by the remark he asked, “What do you mean, isn’t the objective to stay up on the skis and not fall down?”  The instructor simply said, “At this level, if you’re not falling, you’re not learning.”

     No one likes to fall, but it is part of the learning process.  If you can go through life and not fall down odds are you are sitting down. 

     As Kouzes and Posner say in their book, “All significant and meaningful accomplishments involve adversity, difficulty, change, and challenge.  No one ever got anything extraordinary done by keeping things the same.  Risks, uncertainty, and hardships test us.”   I say they not only test us, they improve us.  You see, falling down affords us the opportunity to get back up.  It is better to attempt something and fall, then to sit comfortably idle.