'SECRET TO SUCCESS IS FAILURE,' PARRY TELLS RICHMOND CONTINUING STUDIES GRADS
May 12, 2001
"The secret to success is failure," Scott Parry, known around the world as the trainer of corporate trainers, told about 100 School of Continuing Studies graduates at the University of Richmond today.
"Did you know that Michael Jordan was cut from the varsity basketball team when he was a sophomore in high school? That Thomas Edison spent several years back in the 1870s experimenting with more than 100 substances, all of them failures, before he found the right filament for the first electric light bulb?" he asked.
Citing Booker T. Washington, Parry advised the graduates that success is not measured by a person's achievements, but by the obstacles someone has overcome.
"So, don't expect success on the first or second try," he said, "and if at first you do succeed, then try something harder."
Parry said that given the pace of change in the world, everyone will continue to learn.
"Some of the things you have learned here are timeless and will stay with you throughout your life. Other lessons will have a very short half-life. But, your learning curve will continue to rise," he said.
Parry reminded the audience that we live in the age of innovation, that "change is accelerating at a breathless pace. Does anyone remember what a slide rule is? A typewriter? Carbon paper? Clothes line? A coffee percolator? A mimeograph machine? A dot matrix printer?" he asked.
"Some 25 percent of the jobs that exist today were unknown as recently as ten years ago. Today's wealth is not gained by perfecting what is known, but by imperfectly seizing the unknown."
Parry, chairman of Training House Inc., has conducted workshops for educators and trainers on six continents for the world's largest corporations, the Ford Foundation and UNESCO. His Managerial Assessment of Proficiency (MAP), an assessment exercise, has been translated into seven languages and is used in 21 countries. He was inducted into the Human Resource Development Hall of Fame in 1999.
He lives in Princeton, N.J., where in younger days he was a friend of Albert Einstein. He noted that Einstein's checkbook never balanced.
"Whenever Einstein wrote out a relatively small check, the person receiving it would not cash it, since Einstein's signature was worth more than the check," Parry related. "Of course, when Einstein discovered this, he began to pay for all his shopping by check. He was no dummy!"