“…often, people don’t even truly understand how or why they succeeded in the first place. Success is a very poor teacher — it only teaches you to repeat what you’ve already done. Well, what happens when that stops working, and you have to try something else?” (Dean Graziosi)
I found this a very interesting concept to mull over in my mind. How much time have you spent reconstructing what made you successful at something? It’s been my experience that when I try to reconstruct my journey to success in some area, I realize that there actually were quite a few misses (aka failures) along the way. So I don’t disagree with Dean, but I do think it’s important to break down our successes so we can learn how we actually succeeded.
Too often we dismiss other people’s’ successes as luck or we say something like, “well it’s easy for them, they have more _________ (fill in the blank),” or, “well, I can’t do that because I don’t have ___________ (fill in the blank),” rather than understanding that their journey to success probably also had more “failures” than we’ll ever know about, and then using their success as inspiration for our own continued efforts.So where have you experienced success? How did you do it? Can you spend some time thinking about it? Can you imagine that both failure AND success can be great teachers if you just let them?
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