Success and Failure has been top of mind lately. I had a really amazing conversation with a new friend about the concept of success and why so many of us feel dogged by failure.
The idea behind this is that we never actually know how close we are to our dreams when we’re plugging away at them. Our fruition of things always seems a bit further from our grasp than they actually are. Of course, we have no way of knowing this. All we see is all the work we put in and all the “nothing happening” all around us. It sucks.
Granted, sometimes the things we have planned are not actually worth our time and that seeming failure is actually doing us a favor. Sometimes the things we’re working toward are nothing short of genius and would be an ideal addition to the universal good. The delays in these cases tend to make even less sense to us and especially when we’re most passionate about something, a long enough delay can be pure, unadulterated heart break.
With that in mind, have you ever read the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell? It’s an entire book dedicated to changing our minds on how the success of uber successful people actually played out. Yes, these people are really talented in their respective fields, however, talent alone was only a fraction of what actually led to their success. People like Bill Gates, Michael Jordan, Oppenheimer, and even Gladwell’s mother (Joyce) all reached their success by far more than grit and blatant talent. He even went so far as to chronicle the KIPP Schools and how kids who would under most circumstances be written off as uneducable, are thriving just as well, if not more, than their suburban or private school counterparts. Success, in its most base form, is not about wealth or being poor. It’s not about family status or family structure—although these things help frame our world view about success. Success isn’t even about being a have or a have not or even having a really high IQ.
Success, more than anything else we can think of, is about opportunity and the time we put into preparing for it.
You know why most of us give up? Because we can’t see how what we’re doing now is really preparing us for paying our bills later. Maybe we don’t have a strong enough support system. Maybe we just get tired of hearing “no” all the time. Maybe we just don’t believe that someone like us is worthy of the success we seek.
We, as a culture, have been spoiled a bit by success stories. The same way we talked about believing in magic in a prior post, we believe every line of those success stories of our favorite so and so’s without any inkling of a clue that they are actually modern day fairy tales. In 300 pages or less we read how Mr. or Ms. Fabulous slayed the corporate dragon with their bare hands and with one in a million talent bestowed upon the chosen few, pulled the sword out of the rock and became king or Britney Spears.
The truth behind the fairy tale is that there was a lot of stops, starts, failures, waits, and get up and go agains. There was a lot of folks supporting their effort and yes, there was a lot of failure. Ask that nobody who invented the light bulb. What was his name again?
The point I’m making here is that success is something that is actually attainable for everyone. We determine what success looks like to us and we determine if we have the stick-to-itiveness to stick it out until we manifest the outcome we want. It really is that simple and that hard. The trick is, just as everybody else keeps saying—Don’t Give Up (and probably read Gladwell’s book for good measure)! You got this far. You most definitely can go all the way.
The moral of this story? I have no rightly idea. Just some food for thought. Thank you for reading this though. Peace and abundant and very successful blessings! –e-