Slowly, Beckham improved. After six months, he could get up to 50 keep-me-ups. Six months after that he was up to 200. By the time he got to the age of nine, he had reached a new record: 2,003. In total the sequence took around fifteen minutes and his legs ached at the end of it.
For an outsider looking in this sequence would have seemed miraculous. It would have unfolded like a chain of logic. Two thousand and three touches of the ball without it even touching the ground! It would have seemed like a revelation of genius.
After a couple of years, people would stop and stare,” Ted told me. “He must have taken more than 50,000 free kicks at that park. He had an incredible appetite.
It is striking how often successful people have a counterintuitive perspective on failure. They strive to succeed, like everyone else, but they are intimately aware of how indispensable failure is to the overall process. And they embrace, rather than shy away from, this part of the journey.
the internal fear of failure. This is the threat to ego; the damage to our self-esteem; the fact that many of us can’t admit our mistakes even to ourselves—and often give up as soon as we hit difficulties.
“It is no good spending an entire career cowering in fear of negative feedback, avoiding situations in which you might be judged, and thus preventing any chance of improvement. You haven’t given up; but you haven’t progressed, either.”