Abolish Success, As You Know It
Look up success in a thesaurus and you’ll find, accomplishment and progress but you’ll also see prosperity, victory and fame.
Accomplishment and progress share something crucial, they are both internally defined and under our control. Success need not be defined by what advertisements impose upon you nor what your neighbour has.
We are bombarded by someone else’s metrics for success, “The 10 Things Highly Successful People do Before Breakfast” — yet we are never taught to question what ‘success’ might mean to us. Success, to me is two things, but mostly it’s failure. This comes as no surprise, Success = Failing (a lot).
FAILURE
The first thing, Success = Failing (a lot).
Success may be failing a lot but we never hear of the manuscripts that got rejected, the years spent practising in someones garage, the failed ideas, the late nights and endless hours. We come to this unconscious belief that success will either find us or that we weren’t one of the “lucky” few.
Human’s have a hardwired aversion to anything perceived as punishment and go to great lengths to avoid these experiences. However, we also have this uncanny tendency to simultaneously gravitate towards immediate gratification when we know it offers us no long term benefits.
When you consider failure as a construct, it can be a number of things. For example, failure can be an end-state, if you so define it, the final product of a given amount of resources (e.g., effort and time). Defined in this way failure is like Newtons third law of motion, “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”. The amount of effort we put in results in an outcome equal to that effort which can be defined according to an external metric as a failure or a success.
What if, failure wasn’t defined as an outcome?
What if we defined failure as a process instead? Failure then becomes a signal for change, a signpost that it is time to iterate. It’s time to stop talking about success and start talking about failure. If you want to know how someone succeeded then ask them how they failed. When you begin to think of failing as another step closer to your own version of success then something magical happens, you no longer fear it. Failure becomes a powerful tool which enables iteration.
ITERATION
The second thing, Iteration = Failing Less
Success is a journey of failure and failure is a story of iteration. We are each time wrong, but progress means we aim to be less so each time. In his book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson asks us what we are willing to feel pain for, what we are willing to struggle for.
“This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes.” ― Mark Manson
Nobody said that failing was easy. What they did say is “practice makes perfect” and I’ve learnt that this is true about nearly anything. But not all practice is made equal, effortful and deliberate practice through constant iteration is how progress is made. This is why elite sportsman analyse videos of their performance, to find mistakes, errors or elements for improvement.
To understand what you need to do to get it right you have to also understand what it looks like to get it wrong. It sound so simple but learn from your mistakes. So set your sights on a journey of correction.
LASTLY
Failing + Iteration = Success
Success is not a state of being, nor is it like levelling up in Super Mario. success is a skill which can be taught, learnt and requires practice.
Yes that’s right, learning how to succeed is succeeding at success. Inception, I know (also, try saying it three or four times in a row).
What this means, is that success doesn’t exist in a real sense, it’s just a word to describe how we feel when we make progress, when we become better than we were before. It’s why people we consider successful might not feel that way themselves, because it’s something we must define for ourselves.
So go out there and fail, you might just find your own version of success!
One last thing…
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