In the field of personal change we hear an awful lot about success. That’s all fine and good – we should concentrate on what we want, as we tend to get what we focus on. Then I came across this quote and it made me think…

"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose."

- Bill Gates

You may be thinking to yourself, “That’s alright for a multi-millionaire to say. Personally, I’d rather be successful and never put a foot wrong”.

The big question is – can you realistically expect that? That everything will always go according to plan? Think about it for a moment, and you’ll realise there are certain consequences to getting an easy time.

1. If you haven’t experienced what can go wrong, it’s more difficult to plan for what might go wrong.

Of course, you can learn from the failures of others – there’s nothing that says you have to struggle through everything, reinventing the wheel in the process. My point is that there is a certain value in learning your path through experience – both good and bad.

2. If everything went according to plan on your first attempt, you don’t know any more about getting there than before you started.

This can work out well, as you might have struck the ‘perfect formula’ first time and only need to reproduce that.

However, in our complex and constantly shifting world, this does not happen very often. Most ‘formulas for success’ require constant adjustment through awareness of the potential pitfalls.

3. An easy success can hide the potential risks of further, similar development.

A person can become a victim of their own success, if they expect everything to be so easy that they overextend themselves. Think of a gambler on a winning streak, taking greater and greater risks. And, of course, winning streaks run out.

It’s important to leave as little to chance as you possibly can. If your success is based on luck, then you’ll be subject to both winning and losing streaks.

What successful people fear most.

That is the number one fear of many successful people – What if it was a fluke? Suppose I was just lucky?

Because that presupposes that “If good luck gave me this, bad luck can take it away.”

This is the dread of every successful musician and writer - the One Hit Wonder. Do they really know how to make success? If they lost it all, would they know how to rebuild? Would they know how to be in the right place at the right time – by design?

And every successful person is a One Hit Wonder – at first. Those who really know how they succeeded can get there again. Those are the ones who made a study of failure and turned it into success.

The power of polarity

Success and failure are polar opposites. In most cases, there is a spectrum of choice between such polarities. It’s not just total success or total failure in most cases, though many people will see it that way. There are usually degrees of success and degrees of failure.

How are you defining success? Is it a rare 1% condition of total excellence or just a 50/50 chance? Is it a state of perfection, or a regular life experience? And is that down to your definition? Focus on what you have learned from the experience:

• Are there elements of the project that were successful?

  
  

• Even if you didn’t get your outcome, did some parts of the process go well?

  
  

• If you were to do it again, would you know how to improve those areas that were lacking?

If so, then even a ‘disastrous failure’ can contain the seeds of future successes.

Celebrate early, enjoy often.

‘Getting there’ is very often about how well we keep ourselves going. And that’s down to how much we enjoy the process. Naturally you’ll enjoy the heady bliss of accomplishment when you’re done. What can you do in the meanwhile?

It’s important to realise that success is not just in getting your outcome – it’s also in every step you take towards your goal. Most people give up somewhere on the road to success as they do not celebrate progress; they put off all celebration until they arrive at their goal. And if that goal is a long way in the future, it can be easy to get discouraged.

Take it from someone who knew the value of persistence:

“Many of life's failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

– Thomas Edison

What would it be like if you got to enjoy a little bit of that accomplishment every day? I’ll bet that would keep you on the right road – and moving steadily. Edison is well known for his countless inventions as he was extraordinarily tenacious. He was also unafraid of hard work and enjoyed every minute of it.

It’s said that Edison worked past 10,000 failures to invent the light bulb. That’s a lot of hard knocks. How did he keep going in the face of that?

He knew that every failure was valuable because he learned something from it. Those learnings brought future success even closer because it was his philosophy to draw positive value from every experience.

So how do we turn failure into the substance supporting success?

I’ve already mentioned the power of polarity, so here is a way to put it to practical use.

Exercise – Utilising failure to create success

1. Imagine a horizontal line in front of you with success at one end and failure at the other. Be aware of how they are connected.

   
   

2. Focus on ‘success’ at one end – be aware of any colour, texture, temperature or sound it seems to have.

   
   

3. Add in all the examples of success that you can think of. They may be images, sounds, words or feelings. Just let them go to the ‘success’ end of the spectrum and notice how the whole line changes as a result.

   
   

4. Focus on ‘failure at the other end – be aware of any colour, texture, temperature, sound etc associated with it.

   
   

5. Add in all the examples of failure that you can think of. They may be images, sounds, words or feelings. Let them go to the ‘failure’ end of the spectrum.

   
   

6. Allow the two ‘collections of experience’ to work together. Keep the feelings of success and failure in place as information passes between them. Notice how the ‘success’ part of the spectrum gets even stronger as a result of having added examples of failure.

   
   

7. Allow the ‘success’ to learn from the information of past failures.

   
   

8. Allow the ‘failure’ to be transformed into a more useful feeling by its contribution to future successes.

   
   

9. Reach out and pull the whole spectrum inside yourself and allow it to settle into place.

   
   

10. Test by thinking about a project that you struggled with in the past. Does success seem easier and more attainable if you were to do a similar sort of project in the future?

Allow all your experience, both failure and success to teach you the best way forward and you’ll win more of the time.

©2006 Philip Callaghan

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