The Secret Ingredient For Success
The secret ingredient to success just might be failure. Not abject failure, of course (although it’s always cool to use the word ‘abject’), nor consistent failure. But failure while pushing one’s limits, or while exploring the new and the unknown, might be the magic ingredient in the success recipe.
Why? Success is not simply the absence of failure, it is the defeat of failure. Success is over-coming failure. Indeed, without having failed at something at some time, how do you know what success is? How do you know what it’s supposed to feel like?
Neither success nor failure need be any particular size. Small successes build confidence, and smallish failures teach valuable lessons. It’s important to qualify acceptable failures, though. Failure caused by sloppiness or laziness is ALWAYS bad. On the other hand, failure encountered while stretching beyond one’s limits, while reaching for something new, large, or important…well…that’s the type of failure from which lessons are learned.
It takes a certain chutzpa to put one’s self at risk to fail while in the act of reaching. I like Churchill’s take on it: “Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts.”
Be brave.
Tags: Churchill, courage, Crossfit, failure, seth godin, success, Winston Churchill
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 2nd, 2011 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.