Failure Is Simply The Opportunity To

Ford wrote this in the Introduction to My Life and Work (1922), co-authored with Samuel Crowther. The original wording reads: "Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again. There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail." It appears as the first of a list of principles Ford called "the service motive" — the set of values he believed should underpin any worthwhile enterprise. The book was serialised in McClure's magazine in 1922 and the passage appeared in both the May and October issues.