Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do I, which is why I leave mine in the closet. But if success doesn’t form in a vacuum, where does it come from?
Success and failure are part of the same process and it’s called growth. Lots of failure happens on the way to success. Success might be the end result, but it only happened after trying lots of things that didn’t work, or didn’t work quite right.
Right now there’s a big conference going on with lots of advice on how to be a success. Everybody wants to be a success. We’re even advised very strongly as writers to only talk about our successes because we wouldn’t want to give anybody the impression that we ever *gasp* fail. Because then we would be FAILURES and LOSERS and nobody would ever publish us again. Nobody will ever love us again, either, and we’ll die friendless and alone in our unvacuumed hovels.
Or maybe we could just put aside the drama around success and failure and look at it as a process. When a book has a false start, stalls, takes a wrong turn, that’s called writing a book. It happens. If it was easy, everybody would do it. The way to get to a successfully completed book is to not give up and keep trying different things until you get to the end.
Careers have false starts, stalls, and wrong turns, too. If you quit there it might be called failure. Or it might be what you needed to push you into discovering your real strengths and going on to greater success. Let’s face it, most of us wouldn’t ever change if we didn’t have to. If something works, we keep doing it. Failure tells us we need to try something else. Failure leads to experimentation, discovery, exploration. You can learn a lot from failure, a lot more than you can by accidentally stumbling on success and then having no idea how to recreate it.
I agree with you 100% on this, Charlene. When it comes to failure, we all will have it happen to us at one time or another. The big thing is to learn from it and treat it as part of the pathway to success. Otherwise, we can never learn how to fail well, much less how to succeed spectacularly. Funnier still, I only came to that personally in the past couple of months- that though I was afraid to succeed, it was because what if I fail once I’m there? Now, I’m realizing that it’s okay, it means I’ll have to learn the other methods of getting to where I need to be to be a true success- in my definition of things.
Thanks for writing this!
You’re welcome. I think we need to be more like toddlers; they keep trying until they figure out how to stand without falling back down and how to walk, all the while building up the muscles they need to do it.
One of your best posts. I’m making this a dinner discussion topic, framing it in terms of something I need to work on…but hoping to pass the lesson on to our son, who’s having a tough time.
MJ, hope it helps him.