We should all strive to be successful in whatever we do, but understanding that success is never final and that with failure comes learning - is really the only way we will ever be truly successful. You have to cross a mountain of failures to find the right path to success. There’s nothing that drives ego more than success does, and there’s nothing that has more power to force to stand up like failure. Both may result in positive effect, but only if one knows how to master each.
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm — Winston Churchill
Failure is crucial in our development
You often hear very successful people say that their success is “built upon failure”. Failure is simply paying school fees. With success, one should stay grounded and humble as things can change so quickly. Live throws curved balls, or lemons as some say… often unfairly. Make lemon juice. It’s impossible to juggle success on all fronts at all times. Even if you do, for a while, life will eventually catch up with you. Great reminder to stay humble in this context: if success could be renamed Reward, that you gain after a) putting hard work, b) overcoming failures, c) learning through each step, d) in other words becoming stronger and better thru your journey to meet your passion. Then it can be a way to sit back, relax, enjoy, rejuvenate and get back on the next journey. Everyone and everything needs a break, let the kinetics of actions redeem/relax. Flexibility (aka elasticity) is important and reward or break could be a way to restore energy and then get back on the journey.
Related: Fast-growth Startups
Success can be the price …but never a target
We don’t learn when we keep on failing, we learn when we think, prepare, plan to avoid failures. And if we happen to fail, we learn when we think about why it happened and try to avoid it next time. A person who constantly fails will surely become more negative and risk-averse than one who sees victories. If you don’t know what success looks like, then you won’t know when you’ve got it, and be restless and dissatisfied in everything. If there is a next time, people take it for granted. Sure, perhaps for programmers and project managers. Not for nuclear people, physicians, space flights. And no, not all businesses are created equal, not all of us can actually afford a failure as a learning experience. Wrong - you don’t get places by going the other direction all the time. It takes a bit of humility to be brave enough to say that success shouldn’t be our focus.
“Success” is not a means to an end. To be truly successful we have to keep improving and that involves failure. We have to drop the old for the new to take place. Just enjoy the journey, accept the failures and do not try to be too perfect. At the end, what really matters, is our ability to execute and challenge the status quo.
