Translation by Yehoshua Siskin
I have covered many victory parties, but this week I was invited to my first "defeat party." The volunteer staff of Miriam Peretz gathered to share their experiences and summarize their feelings regarding Miriam's campaign for president of Israel, which failed. What did I learn there? If we know how to take advantage of every experience in life and learn from it, then there is no such thing as a defeat. This is not a cliché. Miriam and the volunteers truly feel that they won. They met nearly 120 Knesset members personally and passed along a message simply by the way they competed and the idea behind their campaign. "A person cannot allow himself not to try his hardest and not to attempt to do things in life, even if at the end there is a chance he won't succeed," Miriam told me. "The road to any success is no less important than the success itself."
We often say that if we want something badly enough, we will succeed in getting it. That the reason for failure is not because we "can't do it," but only because we "don't want to do it." But this is not correct. Most of us will not achieve everything we want. We will not be number one, and not all of our dreams will come true. And here is someone who did not succeed, yet who tells us that it's still worthwhile to try, that it's okay to fail, even with the entire country watching. We need to understand this mindset well, and even celebrate it together.