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Silicon Valley's Lessons in Failure for Baseball Players

July 7, 2015

(Click here for a 1-page .pdf of this newsletter)


One of my favorite baseball quotes is from Tom House, co-founder of the National Pitching Association:


"Baseball is a game of failure taught be negative people in a misinformation environment."


While the quote acknowledges that failure is a component of playing baseball, learning to fail in baseball can be a key ingredient to eventual success.

A recent article the NY Times highlighted the success of companies in Silicon Valley:

NYT 20Title

the key point in the article was that much of the success in Silicon Valley was built on learning from failure:

NYT 20Fail 20passage


What do we take away from this article?

Being a successful baseball players means accepting that failure is a component of eventual success.


In March I gave a presentation on mindset in sports where we discussed that many of our most successful athletes were not physically gifted so much as they had a successful mindset:


“We like to think of our champions and idols as superheroes who were born different from us. We don’t like to think of them as ordinary people who made themselves extraordinary.”

- Carol S. Dweck, PhD

Mindset

You can view this Mindset presentation in my Baseball Video Library. Click here to watch a 1-minute video on the library and click here to subscribe.

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Contact (631-352-7654 / [email protected]) Dr. Arnold!