Just because you succeed, does not make you successful.
Agreeably, you learn so much from failure if you choose to view it as progress and not a setback. Admittadly, success hardly teaches you anything. In fact, you learn very little from success because what got you there were the lessons you learned from failure.
What defines you as a successful person when you succeed is not the completed task, it is when you learn as much from it as you do from failure.
The prevention of this learning is due to the idea that success is a place that you can stop at. When you succeed, you feel you have arrived. But in reality, success is a journey and the only way to become successful is to learn as much as possible on that journey. You have the power and responsibility (insert Spiderman cliché’ here) to learn from your successes as much, if not more than your failures.
Two weeks ago I interviewed for a new job position. The day after the interview, I got the job. Woohoo! While discussing the position and signing papers, I was asked if I had any questions about the new job. What I then did was ask my boss and supervisor what they thought I could do to improve my interview skills.
What? I already got the job, who cares! Right?
Wrong.
If I asked you if you could be more successful than you are now? You would doubtlessly say yes. The only way to do that is to improve in every factor of your life. Sure I nailed the interview with the hammer of confidence and got the job but that does not mean I couldn’t learn more from it. So I asked them what the highlights and downturns were of my interview. I succeeded in getting the job, but that does not mean I reached my destination. It does not mean I learned all I needed.
Since there is always room for improvement, there is always room for more success. And if you are not going to learn from failures because you succeed in something, force yourself to learn everything you can about your success and how to succeed further, because you can, because you deserve to, because success is a journey and not a destination.
Stay Positive & Succeed As If You Failed
Garth E. Beyer
