Success looks widely different depending on the perceptive you view it through. A virus is successful when it has become widely transmitted, a boat succeeds in fulfilling its role when the hull is lowered into water and it resists sinking, and a student finds success every time an exam returns with a passing grade.
Success does not inherently imply an outcome which positive or negative, rather success simply implies than an outcome which is favorable to someone or something has been accomplished.
Every day we get out of bed, and we proceed to follow through on a series of commitments. Those commitments might include your job duties, class work, or child care. When we proceed to follow through on our day-to-day routines, we’re achieving a number of everyday successes. These are the kind of successes which tend to be overlooked and underappreciated.
Every day Google successfully serves results for billions of search queries, 100,000 flights succeed in safely transporting travelers to their destinations , and I never fail to succeed in procrastinating on whatever work might need to get done for the day. Other accomplishments may take cumulative effort applied over much larger spans of time.
Each year on January 1st, en masse, people participate in the tradition of making new year’s resolutions. Lists are formed containing all of the changes a person would like make throughout the course of the next year, and they tell themselves that this time commitments are going to kept and successes witnessed.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t remember the last time I followed through on one of my new year’s resolutions. There are plenty of reasons why new year’s resolutions tend to end in failure. One major contributing factor is that people are simply not at a point in their lives where they’re ready to commit to the changes in action necessary to follow through on their goals. Regardless, each year there’s bound to be some percentage of these resolutions which result in success.
Success which is found after months or even years of applied effort is often times the kinds of success which is only ever obtained a couple of times throughout our lives. Graduation, marriage, or founding a business are examples of formative accomplishments which play a role in defining our life’s path as well as our identities.
Success is more than just achieving goals. It’s the acquisition of abilities over long periods of time. It’s the feeling you have when you’re looking back on a lifetime of fulfilling work and knowing that your actions have contributed to making the lives of others better. Success is explosive proliferation of biological organisms who have conquered the environments they inhabit.
The point is that success is subjective by nature, it manifests itself in ways which we experience everyday, and in others which we many only experience a handful of times throughout our lives.
“Success is 99% failure”
- Henry Ford
What would a discussing surrounding success be if we didn’t consider it’s inverse?
If success is the result of a favorable outcome, then failure is derived from an unfavorable outcome; however, despite their opposing connotations, success and failure are not mutually exclusive events.
One might choose to look at an undeniable failure such as the release of New Coke, a reformulated version of Coke which was released in 1985. The Coca-Cola Company made a massive miscalculation by phasing out the original Coke formula and the backlash was significant and nearly universal.
By anyone’s standards, the product itself was a major failure. Fans of the product made it known that they were outraged by the change, resulting in the Coca-Cola company backtracking and bringing back the original formula. While New Coke sounds like a massive failure, because it was, the reversal of the change reminded people of their attachment to the product and brought in brought in a much needed revitalization of the brand.
The product was a failure but the outcome of its release was still favorable for the company.
You’re undoubtedly familiar with the sentiment that with failure comes the opportunity to learn. At the end of the day, our actions dictate our successes. Failure is a key component in the process of success because not only does it help us to align our future actions with our goals, but when taken in stride, failure behaves as the most powerful motivator in pursuing success.