Inspiring Personalities Series - 2

Abraham Lincoln - a failure at 50?

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• As a young man, Abraham Lincoln went to war a captain and returned a private.
• Later he tried his hand in business & he was a failure as a businessman.
• As a lawyer in Springfield, he was too impractical and temperamental to be a success.
• He turned to politics and was defeated in his first try for the legislature.
• Again defeated in his first attempt to be nominated for congress.
• Defeated in his application to be commissioner of the General Land Office.
• Defeated in the senatorial election of 1854.
• Defeated in his efforts for the vice-presidency in 1856.
• Defeated in the senatorial election of 1858.

At about that time, he wrote in a letter to a friend, "I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth."

He was also reported to be suffering from "melancholy", a condition which now is referred to as clinical depression

Undeterred by all the failures, Abraham Lincoln went on to become the 16th President of the United States of America in 1860. He then won a second term in 1864 but was assassinated just a year into his second term in 1865.

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The above list of his failures have been in wide circulation from as early as 1873, when a few self-help writers had spun inspiration from Lincoln’s failures; their efforts were sufficiently well-known by the turn of the century when Lincoln’s biographer and former secretary John G. Nicolay felt obliged to rebut the contrarian view. “Failures? Not so,” he wrote in A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln.

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After consecutive political defeats in the early 1960s, Richard Nixon decorated his law office with a copper plaque entitled “Lincoln’s Failures.

As the story of Abraham Lincoln 'A failure at 50' is quoted & debated, in my opinion, it does not really matter whether all of that is true or not unless you are an historian who is only concerned with facts. I would try to take home a lesson from the supposed failures and draw inspiration from this narrative - for the simple reason that all of us have faced failure of some kind in our lives. And in the face of such failures, we need to take stock of the failure, learn from it & keep moving ahead till we are satisfied that our effort has produced a meaningful result.

Today, Abraham Lincoln is celebrated as one among the greatest American presidents.

Thanks for reading. The intention is to inspire.

Please also do check out my other posts
https://steemit.com/inspiration/@cryptopal/inspiring-personalities-series-1