Fran Tarkenton Quotes

Winning means being unafraid to lose

Fran Tarkenton, a one-time great NFL quarterback, says it still another way: “Winning means being unafraid to lose.

Innovation is business unusual. It’s about actually doing stuff so that you can learn from the doing.

As I see it now—and as I saw it back then—you learn the most about career, life, business, and yourself by taking every opportunity to move outside of your comfort zone. By definition, the comfortable and the familiar have nothing new to teach you. The most successful people in life and business are innovators. By definition, innovators need to be uncomfortable.

Just about everybody sees desperation as a negative. The emotional state of the truly pathetic, it seems to most something to be shed and shunned. But not to me. I embraced my desperation, let it drive me, pushing me in directions I never thought of before—like developing a running game and doing everything I could to help my teammates perform at their highest levels.

The worst mistake you can make is to think of failure as final. Aside from the fact that both words start with the letter f, there is no necessary connection between them. Failure, like success, is a moment in time. Win or lose, there is more on the other side. What you will make of that more depends on what you learn from the mere blip of success or failure. No doubt, success feels a lot better. No doubt, failure has a lot more to teach us.

Failure is a point in a life or career, and neither a single failure nor a single success is likely to last long, let alone forever.

Profit isn’t and shouldn’t be the mission of business. The mission of business is to help people. To help your customers, your co-workers, your employees, and your partners. Success is not a number — it’s not X dollars or Y customers — it’s a measurement of VALUE.