“Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently” Henry Ford
I am an eternal optimist, inherited it from my Grandfather. As a young boy I often sat on the knees of my grandfather and listen to his many colorful stories about the “big world” far beyond our little village in western Hungary. Grandfather was a talented story teller; his stories were always positive, conveying that anything is possible in life if you dream high enough. The last time I saw grandfather was 54 years ago on November 18th. As a former student leader in the 1956 Hungarian revolution I was facing imprisonment or even the possibility of execution. Grandfather urged me to escape to Austria. His last words were to me: “Go to the big world, live our dream”. So I did; made it to Austria on November 19th and a new life was started in refugee camps, first in Austria then in England.
My dream in Hungary was to go to University but now I was an 18-year old high school dropout and only spoke Hungarian. It was time to follow grandfather’s advice: “never give up your dream”. So I focused on learning English fast and explored opportunities that were made available to foreign students by the World University Services. With hard work and some good fortune, within 10 months I got admitted to the University of Edinburgh to study forestry. While in Hungary I was going to study law, in Edinburgh I re-focused to study forestry, capitalizing on an earlier failure when for political reasons I was not allowed to enter high school for a year and had to work as a laborer in the forest. This background combined with requesting to take the entrance exam in calculus (because of my poor English) allowed me to enter University with a full scholarship from the World University Services.
The next major challenge that I ended up taking head on was in 1970. I was working as a research scientist with the Canadian Forestry Service, which required working in the field for about 40% of time. But one day I had severe back pain and the doctor diagnosed it as Ankylosing Spondylitis, also called Marie-Strumpell Disease, a disease that causes long-term, chronic back pain. Realizing that wo+rking outdoors may no longer be possible, I re-focused my research work and started to develop computer simulation models for forest management applications. This new direction has given me lucrative career opportunities, such as publishing over 30 scientific papers, being key-note speaker at major international conferences, representing Canada for 4 years on an international scientific commission, and rising to senior positions in both Government and the private sector. My spondylitis is under control and I am still enjoying this work. In fact, I decided never to retire; I may cut back a bit when I reach 80.
During my life journey I have learned that when you are dealt with a failure, it takes the same amount of energy to re-focus and succeed in a new direction as to feeling sorry for yourself and turning into a pessimist. So I chose to be an optimist rather than a pessimist. I like Sir Winston Churchill’s characterization of this outlook: “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” One of my favorite authors, Paulo Coelho, wrote: “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” I agree with this statement. At the same time it is also true that “Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute.” (G.B. Stern).
Now that I am a grandfather, I challenge my grandchildren to dream and be happy on the exciting journey of making the dream a reality.
