A few years ago a woman in North Carolina attempted to set a world record while playing a convenience store video game. After standing in front of the game for fourteen hours and scoring an unprecedented seven and a half million points, she made her fiancée call a television crew to record the moment when she’d achieve ten million points. Unfortunately, while setting up their lights, the camera team accidentally unplugged the game, thus bringing her bid to an untimely end! It was the effort to publicize her achievement that became the agent of her ultimate failure.
If there’s a moral in that story it would have to be the words of an unknown missionary who said: ‘Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at something that doesn’t really matter.’